The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  45. “Darkest China”: See Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris, eds., Expeditionary Anthropology: Teamwork, Travel, and the “Science of Man” (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018).

  46. “supreme trophy”: Roy Chapman Andrews, “Hunting the Great Ram of Mongolia,” Harper’s, February 1921.

  47. “almost as smooth as a tennis court”: Roy Chapman Andrews, The New Conquest of Central Asia.

  48. “The world has other sacred cities”: Andrews, The New Conquest of Central Asia.The women’s headdresses were so colorful and elaborate they reminded him of a flock of butterflies. He wrote, “The wife of one of the great khans in particular was the most magnificently adorned creature I have ever seen. According to the custom of the northern Mongol women, she had her hair plaited over a frame into two enormous flat braids, curved like the horns of a mountain sheep and reinforced with bars of gold. Each horn ended in a gold plaque, studded with precious stones, and supporting a pendant braid like a riding-quirt. This was enclosed in a long cylinder of gold, heavily jeweled. On her head, between the ‘horns,’ the lady wore a gold filigree cap studded with rubies, emeralds, and turquoises, and surmounting this, a ‘saucer’ hat of black and yellow, richly trimmed with sable. Just above her ears great ropes of pearls hung from her gold cap halfway to her waist...”

  49. “Every house and shop”: Ibid.

  50. “indescribable mixture of Russia, Mongolia, and China”: Andrews, Across Mongolian Plains: A Naturalist’s Account of China’s “Great Northwest.”

  51. “There is no similar area”: Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews, Camps and Trails in China: A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China (New York: D. Appleton, 1918).

  52. Gobi: There are two ways to look at the Gobi’s ranking as the third-largest desert. At 500,000 square miles, the Gobi is actually the fifth largest if you count the polar deserts Antarctic (5.5 million square miles) and Arctic (5.4 million square miles); it’s third behind the non-polar deserts Sahara in northern Africa (3.5 million square miles) and the Arabian, on the Arabian Peninsula (1 million square miles). Marco Polo called the Gobi “the abode of many evil spirits which amuse travellers to their destruction with most extraordinary illusions.” See Troy Sternberg, “Desert Boundaries: The Once and Future Gobi,” The Geographical Journal (March 2015). See also Edward Wong, “How China’s Politics of Control Shape the Debate on Deserts,” New York Times, October 27, 2016.

  53. Knowledge of Eastern Asia’s fossils: Roy Chapman Andrews, “New Expedition to Central Asia,” Natural History 20 (September–October 1920).

  54. “crossed and recrossed” and “studied by the exact methods”: Andrews, The New Conquest of Central Asia.

  55. “unusual obstacles”: Andrews and Andrews, Camps and Trails.

  56. “roaring train”: Andrews, Across Mongolian Plains.

  57. “relic of the Pleistocene”: Andrews, The New Conquest.

  58. “great flat feet” and “natural road-makers”: Andrews, On the Trail of Ancient Man.

  59. Central Asiatic Expeditions: The American Museum of Natural History published a nine-volume work titled Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History, Under the Leadership of Roy Chapman Andrews. Volume 1, published in 1918, was called Preliminary Contributions in Geology, Palaeontology and Zoology, 1918–1925. On Amazon, I recently saw a hardcover set titled Collected Works of the Central Asiatic Expeditions to Mongolia and China; bound in bright yellow, the collection was on offer from a rare-books dealer for $6,033.

  60. “We should try to reconstruct”: Andrews, Under a Lucky Star.

  61. “As we sat in the mess tent at night”: Andrews, The New Conquest.

  62. photos and film: Some footage was lost, but a remarkable amount of archival materials remain in the American Museum of Natural History’s excellent library. To see some of J. B. Shackelford’s stunning expedition photos, go to http://lbry-web-007.amnh.org/digital/index.php/collections/show/10.

  63. “dry achievements of science”: Helena Huntington Smith, “Hunter of the Snark,” The New Yorker, June 29, 1929. Smith called Andrews an “excellent amateur,” saying his chief contribution to the Central Asiatic Expeditions was as organizer and public enthusiast.

  64. “the covered wagon of the Gobi Desert”: Dodge Brothers Inc. brochure, 1925. The Mongolian terrain was exceedingly difficult but Andrews liked Dodge cars for the flexible chassis and the engine’s more than 28 horsepower. “A Dodge had climbed the Twin Peaks of San Francisco higher than any other car, and was the first automobile to reach the floor of the Grand Canyon and climb back out under its own power,” wrote Clive Coy, the University of Alberta’s chief vertebrate paleontology technician, and a brilliant, thorough collector of Roy Chapman Andrews memorabilia. On his archived blog, Whales, Camps & Trails, you can see historic photos and much more; see http://whalescampsandtrails.blogspot.com.

  65. “Most people derive a thrill”: Smith, “Hunter of the Snark.”

  66. “contribution of large value”: Roy Chapman Andrews, “A New Search for the Oldest Man,” Asia (“The American Magazine on the Orient”), November 1920.

  67. “friendly relations” and “destined to increase the prestige”: Ibid.

  68. “Soon it became a small city”: Andrews, The New Conquest of Central Asia.

  69. “There is almost unending bargaining”: Roy Chapman Andrews, “Scientific Work in Unsettled China,” Natural History 22 (May–June 1922).

  70. “It is a delightful Aladdin’s Lamp”: As quoted in Preston, Dinosaurs in the Attic.

  71. “the roof of the world”: Andrews, The New Conquest. Kalgan, by the way, is today called Zhangjiakou. The city of over four million is a scheduled skiing, snowboarding, and biathlon venue for the 2022 Winter Olympics, to be headquartered in Beijing.

  72. “Red hills and buttes”: Ibid.

  73. “I knew that something unusual had happened”: Ibid.

  CHAPTER 11: THE FLAMING CLIFFS

  1. “one of the most picturesque places”: Andrews, The New Conquest of Central Asia.

  2. “vast pink basin,” “for when seen,” and “there appeared”: Ibid.

  3. “almost as though led by an invisible hand”: Ibid.

  4. “obviously reptilian”: Ibid.

  5. “Water that was up to our ankles”: See Douglas J. Preston, “A Daring Gamble in the Gobi Desert Took the Jackpot,” Smithsonian, December 1987.

  6. “the clear impression”: Preston, “A Daring Gamble.”

  7. “In his heart”: Ibid.

  8. “Mr. Andrews is at bottom that ancient type”: Smith, “Hunter of the Snark.”

  9. “I hope you know”: See Vincent L. Morgan and Spencer G. Lucas, Walter Granger, 1872–1941, Paleontologist, bulletin 19 (Albuquerque: New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, 2002). This is a fascinating account of Granger’s importance to paleontology and his relationship to Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrews had a serious scholarly mission, as Mike Novacek once put it, but by all accounts Granger was the real (and relatively unheralded) scientist. In 1941, the American Museum sold the T. rex holotype found by Barnum Brown to the Carnegie Museum of Natural Museum in Pittsburgh. See Christopher Joyce, “Bone to Pick: First T. Rex Skeleton, Complete at Last,” Morning Edition, NPR, September 14, 2011. See also the Carnegie Museum’s website, https://carnegiemnh.org/tyrannosaurs-rex/.

  10. “universally held in esteem”: Ibid.

  11. Coaxing bones from dust: If a poorly collected or damaged fossil reached the laboratory in New York “it was said to have been ‘RCA’d.’” See Gallenkamp, Dragon Hunter.

  12. “At Granger’s core lay the master craftsman”: Morgan and Lucas, Walter Granger. They wrote that Granger would be only “barely mentioned in most accounts of paleontological exploration and even in American Museum retrospectives...”

  13. “Do your utmost”: Andrews, The New Conquest of Central Asia.

  14. “lapdog-sized predator covered in feathers”: See Step
hen Brusatte, “New Fossil Reveals Velociraptor Sported Feathers,” Scientific American, July 17, 2015.

  15. “With mounting excitement”: Preston, Dinosaurs in the Attic.

  16. Dinosaur eggs: My favorite line about dinosaur eggs may be the one John Updike wrote in the spring of 1958. After a trade with a museum in Aix-en-Provence, France, the American Museum of Natural History now had on display a Jurassic egg, probably sauropod. “The egg sat alone in a glass case, thousands of miles and millions of years from Mother,” Updike wrote. See John Updike, “Dinosaur Egg,” The New Yorker, April 19, 1958.

  17. “egg thief”: For the original paper see Henry Fairfield Osborn, Peter C. Kaisen, and George Olsen, “Three new Theropoda, Protoceratops zone, central Mongolia,” American Museum Novitates 144 (1924).

  18. “What are the darned things worth?” and related: “The Eggs and I,” by Roy Chapman Andrews, ran in newspapers across the country, including in the Los Angeles Times on August 31, 1952.

  19. “spread the gospel”: Andrews, Under a Lucky Star.

  20. “a sucked orange”: Ibid.

  21. “That’s you”: Ibid.

  22. “all-American expedition”: Gallenkamp, Dragon Hunter.

  23. “Imperial objectives”: Ronald Rainger, An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn & Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, 1890–1935 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1991).

  24. “ranger hat,” “especially white,” and “embodied”: Ibid.

  25. “paleontological Garden of Eden”: See Colbert, The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries, and also Evans Clark, “Tracing the First Man in Asia,” New York Times, September 13, 1925.

  26. John Barrymore: Andrews declined to give him one but did give Barrymore “a dozen bits of shell about the size of my thumb nail.” See Andrews, Under a Lucky Star. For more on Barrymore’s collection obsession, see my New Yorker story “The Tallest Trophy,” about the time he took a Tlingit totem pole from Alaska and erected it in his backyard in Hollywood. It ran in the April 20, 2015, issue and can be found at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2015/04/20/the-tallest-trophy.

  27. “more than anything else”: Andrews, “The Eggs and I.”

  28. “grand publicity stunt” and related: Andrews, Under a Lucky Star.

  29. “We have got a perfectly good ‘corner’” and related: Ibid.

  30. “Dinosaur Egg 100,000,000 Years Old for Sale”: New York Times, January 8, 1924.

  31. “none had ever before been bought,” “greatly exceeded”: Ibid.

  32. “Illustrated London”: Andrews, Under a Lucky Star.

  33. Austen B. Colgate: A young Colgate, Bayard, worked on the Central Asiatic Expeditions as a field mechanic. Colgate University uses the egg, laid by an oviraptorid, in research to this day. “Its importance cannot be overemphasized because the egg (and its sibling eggs) provided the first definitive evidence of how some dinosaurs reproduced, opening up a whole new area of research on dinosaurs,” Colgate geology professor Connie Soja wrote on the school’s Dinosaur Egg Research page. In 2004, she visited Bayanzag, aka the Flaming Cliffs, to see the egg’s discovery site. After hiking to the top of the formation at dawn, she wrote, “What an adventure to be there as the sun was coming up...Knowing our egg’s historical significance, not just to Colgate but to paleontology, added an emotional element to walking in Roy Chapman Andrews’s footsteps...” For more information, go to colgate.edu.

  34. “The original Easter egg!”: Andrews, Under a Lucky Star.

  35. Everyone would assume: Ibid.

  36. “all lands and resources”: Mongolian Constitution, 1924. See The Constitutions of Mongolia: 1924, 1940, 1960, 1992, edited by B. Chimid and Ts. Sarantuya from materials compiled by J. Amarsana and O. Batsaikhan (Mongolian Academy of Sciences, 2009). You can find this online at Stanford Libraries.

  37. “My eggs” and related: Andrews, “The Eggs and I.”

  38. “They couldn’t know”: Andrews, Under a Lucky Star.

  39. “friendly relations, especially for trade”: Addleton, Mongolia and the United States.

  40. “lesson was obvious enough”: Ibid.

  41. “worth less than that of a sheep”: Andrews, The New Conquest of Central Asia.

  42. “We rode at full speed”: Andrews, On the Trail of Ancient Man.

  43. “Except for the modern weapons”: Ibid.

  44. “dashing horsemen,” “strange costumes,” and “Russians”: Andrews, The New Conquest in Central Asia.

  45. “In short, one was treated as a spy”: Ibid.

  46. “high-powered binoculars”: Morgan and Lucas, Walter Granger.

  47. “Reynolds”: Ibid. In Dragon Hunter, Gallenkamp wrote that Andrews was “one of many civilian informants, operating under various guises, whose job it was to gather data on a wide range of subjects for use in formulating American policies in eastern Asia. Andrews, for example, filed reports dealing with, among other things, political conditions in China, communication and rail facilities, troop movements, industrial output, armaments, shipping and ports, and evidence of foreign intervention—particularly Japanese—in China and Manchuria.”

  48. “salient lines”: Morgan and Lucas, Walter Granger. Gallenkamp also covers the short-lived “Reynolds” period in Dragon Hunter.

  49. “the murder of white residents”: Roy Chapman Andrews, “Further Adventures of the American Men of the Dragon Bones,” Natural History 29 (March–April 1929).

  50. “packed to the rails”: Ibid.

  51. “Murder and sudden death”: Andrews, The New Conquest of Central Asia.

  52. Purges: The purges of the 1930s are Mongolia’s most terrible secret and legacy. Even after all this time citizens are just now learning the truth of what happened during this period. By some estimates as many as 100,000 (in a population of 700,000 at the time) were killed or went missing. Mass graves filled with monks have turned up. See Kathy Chenault, “Mongolians Seek Truth of Purges,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1992.

  53. “Is it surprising that I was filled with regret”: Andrews, On the Trail of Ancient Man.

  54. CHAPTER 12: MARKET CONDITIONS

  55. Ambassador Joseph Lake: A good resource for understanding the first U.S. mission to Mongolia in the early 1990s is an oral history with Lake conducted by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project. The organization operates out of the State Department’s George P. Schulz National Foreign Affairs Training Center, in Arlington, Virginia. Initial interview conducted by Charles Stuart Kennedy on September 5, 1994. Published by ADST, 1998. adst.org.

  56. “It is obvious”: For excerpts of Gorbachev’s address to the UN General Assembly, see “The Gorbachev Visit; Excerpts from Speech to U.N. on Major Soviet Military Cuts,” New York Times, December 8, 1988. For additional context, see “Gorbachev’s Approach to the United Nations: Image Building at US Expense?” (declassified), Office of Global Issues, Central Intelligence Agency, September 1989.

  57. “rule of law” and related: Ibid. Gorbachev address to the UN General Assembly.

  58. “unwittingly sown the seeds”: Kaplonski, Truth, History and Politics in Mongolia.

  59. Tiananmen Square: On February 26, 1989, in a sit-down in Beijing with President George H. W. Bush, Deng Xiaoping, the leader of Communist China, complained that Russia ceded far too much of Mongolia after World War II. China had lost territory and still wasn’t happy about it. Deng had been the leader of Communist China since 1978, assuming power after Mao Zedong. The Nixon administration had eased the way for diplomatic relations by softening trade and travel restrictions, but it was the 1972 visit by Nixon and White House national security adviser Henry Kissinger that became the “historic breakthrough” leading to improved economic ties. Deng had deepened those ties during a historic visit to the United States in 1979, when he said China could “leapfrog the years in which the world had passed it by, but only with American support.” “He
was ready to cooperate on containing the Soviet Union, even agreeing to the installation of secret American intelligence listening posts along the Chinese border, to track Soviet missiles, wrote Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.” (See Richard Holbrooke, “The Day the Door to China Opened Wide,” Washington Post, December 15, 2008.) In the years since, Deng had come to symbolize the “Chinese aspiration to move beyond the ideological extremism that had marked the Maoist era, and reclaim for the Chinese a long-denied prosperity.” The New York Times noted, “Where Mao had preached ‘Communes are good,’ Mr. Deng simply preached ‘Markets are good.’” Deng stood five feet tall (Kissinger once referred to him as a “nasty little man”) and rarely appeared in public. Observers noticed that he showed no emotion, wit, or fleetness of mind. While he participated in groundbreaking talks he rejected democracy and showed a willingness to crush dissent. For him, noted the Times, “China’s economic reform could only occur under the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party.” At the Beijing conference Bush was expected to broach the subject of human rights but never did. Four months later, the Chinese government declared martial law, killing demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. See Patrick E. Tyler, “Deng Xiaoping: A Political Wizard Who Put China on the Capitalist Road,” New York Times, February 20, 1997. While Deng participated in groundbreaking talks he rejected democracy and showed a willingness to crush dissent. For him, noted the Times, “China’s economic reform could only occur under the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party.”

  60. Tiananmen Square: The exact number of dead remains unclear. “No public discussion of the tragedy is possible in China,” the New York Times reported in 2012. See Didi Kirsten Tatlow, “Tragedy of Tiananmen Still Unfolds,” New York Times, June 13, 2012.

  61. Soviet dissident Garry Kasparov: “What I am fighting against is the same all over the world, wherever it happens to be: It is called evil,” he told the interviewer. When the interviewer asked Kasparov about future business projects he said, “I have a friend who has a computer business in Moscow, a cooperative company. When he meets new partners from the West, his first question to them is, ‘Have you read Alice in Wonderland?’ They will answer yes, then he says, ’Imagine you are in Wonderland, and we will start our discussions from there....I just had a thought the other day: Why don’t we sell the Kuril Islands to the Japanese? Frankly speaking, I’m not sure that these islands belong to us, and the Japanese, who claim them, would give us billions and billions of dollars for them! That would keep us going for maybe five or ten years. Then we could sell Mongolia to China and get a few more years that way. But the best deal would be to sell East Germany to West Germany...” See Louis Blair, “Playboy Interview: Garry Kasparov,” Playboy, November 1989.