The Dinosaur Artist

by Paige Williams

  62. “the perfect warrior”: It’s been said that “Genghis Khan” translates to “ruler of all” though “perfect warrior” is often used to describe Chinggis. See Mark Fineman, “Mongolia Reform Group Marches to Rock Anthem,” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1990.

  63. Politburo’s resignation: The old regime never intended a full democratic transformation but rather seemed interested in exploring expanded freedoms under socialism, analysts later said. One leader of a reform faction of the ruling party had become known as “Mongolia’s Yeltsin,” for instance, “after proposing in a Party magazine that the nation renounce Marxism and initiate a market economy.” He said he looked forward to “the emergence of ‘a national capitalist—a richest man in our country.’” See Fred C. Shapiro, “Starting from Scratch,” New Yorker, January 20, 1992.

  64. “An isolated and little-known country”: Fineman, “Mongolia Reform Group Marches to Rock Anthem.” Fineman reported that the hottest rock song in Ulaanbaatar during the democratic revolution was called “Genghis Khan.”

  65. “21st Century”: See Karl Malakunas, “Genghis Khan, a 21st Century Marketing Phenomenon,” Agence-France Presse, October 8, 2006.

  66. “greatness and complexity”: Michael Novacek’s richly detailed Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs informs much of this chapter. Dinosaurs is a first-person narrative account of the American Museum of Natural History’s return to the Gobi Desert in 1990, for the first time in the better part of a century.

  67. Demberelyin “Dash” Dashzeveg, Altangerel Perle, and Rinchen Barsbold: Descriptions and information come from Novacek’s account and interviews with various paleontologists and crew members.

  68. “small enough”: Ibid.

  69. “biological empires”: Ibid.

  70. “It seemed an absurd predicament”: Novacek wrote, “No one had any gas, so it was impossible to get food from the country to the city. Conversely, the country villages and towns could not get basic stores of flour, sugar, salt, or canned goods.”

  71. “Big Gobi circuit”: East from Ulaanbaatar then roughly a circle down nearly to the Chinese border and back up again. “By the second day of travel, the unbroken rolling hills of rusty grass became oppressively boring,” Novacek wrote, then quoted the travel writer Paul Theroux, who was referring to northwestern Turkey when he wrote: “Featurelessness is the steppes’ single attribute, and having said that and assigned it a shade of brown, there is nothing more to say.” See Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train through Asia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975).

  72. “broiling isolated depression”: Novacek, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs.

  73. “audaciously penetrated”: Ibid.

  74. Grand canyon and related: Ibid.

  75. “Giant Carnivorous Dinosaurs”: See E. A. Maleev, “Giant Carnivorous Dinosaurs of Mongolia,” trans. F. J. Alcock, Doklady, USSR Academy of Sciences 104, 4 (1955). A more recent translation can be found in the monograph “Giant Carnosaurs of the Family Tyrannosauridae,” translated separately by Catherine Siskron and S. P. Welles, and Jisuo Jin, and edited into one volume by Matthew Carrano. Maleev was still working on the descriptions when he died unexpectedly in 1966. The translations can be found at paleoglot.org.

  76. “Everything about it”: Novacek, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs.

  77. “forgotten corner”: Ibid. Also see John Noble Wilford, “For Fossil Hunters, Gobi Is No Desert,” New York Times, September 13, 2005.

  78. Xanadu: The dinosaurs included six ankylosaur skeletons, “some with perfectly preserved tails and tail spikes,” Novacek reported, plus over a dozen skeletons of small theropods and an “excellent” skull and one of the few known skeletons of Oviraptor. Altogether the team had found “the most diverse assemblage of theropods from any single location.” See “Major Dinosaur Find,” Washington Post, April 6, 1994.

  79. “I found something” and related: Novacek, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs.

  80. “clues”: Ibid.

  81. “historical, cultural”: Mongolian Constitution. See “The constitutions of Mongolia: 1924, 1940, 1960, 1992,” compiled by J. Amarsana, O. Batsaikhan; edited by B. Chimid, Ts. Sarantuya; Mongolian Academy of Sciences, 2009. Via Stanford Libraries.

  82. “non-bourgeois”: See Ichinkhorloo Lkhagvasuren, “The Current Status of Mongolia’s Museums: Changes Taking Place in the Practical Activities of Museums Since the 1990s,” in New Horizons for Asian Museums and Museology, edited by Naoko Sonoda. This is a valuable overview of what was happening with Mongolian museums before and after the fall of Communism in 1990.

  83. “made of soft material”: Ibid.

  84. Market for everything: “The nearest thing to a precedent for what is taking place in this impoverished, sparsely populated nation landlocked between Russia and China may be the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, when a starter’s gun sent fifty thousand would-be settlers racing to stake claims on some two million acres of former Indian territory,” Fred Shapiro reported in the New Yorker. Shapiro acknowledged that the analogy isn’t “precise” but the point stands. See Shapiro, “Starting from Scratch.”

  85. “keep their passports”: Kaplonski, Truth, History and Politics in Mongolia.

  86. “Imagine in the 1930s”: Addleton, Mongolia and the United States.

  87. “almost twice as severe”: Ibid.

  88. “lesser assets of the state”: Shapiro, “Starting from Scratch.”

  89. Mongolian stock exchange: Ibid. The stock exchange was housed in a pink building on Sukhbaatar Square once belonging to a children’s theater. “Economists in your country, if they study and work hard, maybe someday will get to the top and administer your banking system,” Naidansurengiin Zoljargal, the exchange’s architect and chairman, told The New Yorker. “Me, I’m creating an economic system from nothing. I am actually doing economics.”

  90. “trip to Antarctica”: Novacek, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs.

  91. “epic in scale”: Website of Bob Burnham, a senior research computing associate and adjunct assistant professor of business administration at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. Burnham also worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department. See http://www.dart mouth.edu/~bburnham/mongolia/

  92. “a BBC television crew”: Shapiro, “Starting from Scratch.”

  93. Homelessness: For an overview see Stephanie Hoo, “For Children in Mongolia, a Life on the Streets,” Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2005. Also see Javier C. Hernández, “‘We Don’t Exist:’ Life inside Mongolia’s Swelling Slums,” New York Times, October 2, 2017. Related: pollution. The people who live in the ger districts on the fringes of Ulaanbaatar burn tires and other trash, contributing to the city’s horrific pollution problem. There’s a “huge human cost of mortality, where climate not only has caused the mortality of livestock but also contributed to the loss of livelihoods and culture,” researchers reported in Environment Science Letters. See et al. “Dzuds, droughts, and livestock mortality in Mongolia,” Environmental Research Letters 10, 7 (July 17, 2015).

  94. “fantastically wealthy”: Kaplonski, Truth, History and Politics in Mongolia. Also see Thomas Crampton, “A Mongolian Shopping Spree Fizzles,” International Herald Tribune, June 25, 1998. Collected in In Their Own Words: Selected Writings by Journalists on Mongolia, 1997–1999, ed. David South (DSConsulting, 2015).

  95. “Under no circumstances”: Andrews, The New Conquest of Central Asia. According to Shapiro, Buddhist scripture forbade disturbing “the earth’s blessed sleep.” See Shapiro, “Starting from Scratch.”

  96. “no encampment is safe”: See Frans August Larson, Larson—Duke of Mongolia (Worcestershire, UK: Read Books Ltd., 2013).

  97. Dinosaur tourism: Most recently, an Odyssey Traveller tour was scheduled for May 2018 “under the auspices of the...Mongolian Academy of Sciences.” For $12,363 per person, guests could buy a “unique experience to contribute to the world’s understanding of Mongolian dinosaurs through paleontolog
y.” Archaeological Institute of America tours long featured guides “who represent the rock stars of the paleontological world,” USA Today reported in 2001. The trips also called the public’s attention to the importance of conservation, and could serve as “a thank-you to private supporters of research or an inducement to provide more support.” As one archaeologist put it, “Why should only archaeologists have the right to see things?”

  98. “As long as people are interested”: Dan Vergano, “Tourists Dig Expeditions Sponsored by Scientists,” USA Today, August 23, 2001.

  99. Watching them through binoculars: In November 2008 the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Michael Ryan, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, had recently returned to the Gobi to dig out a T. bataar found in 2005, only to find the skull, hands, and feet missing. Crude tools had been left behind, including a “chisel fashioned from a sharpened engine rod” and “a hammer made of a rock duct-taped to a stick.” Sixty percent of the creature remained but Ryan’s travel companions, “adventure tourists,” had never excavated fossils so Ryan left the bones in the ground. He couldn’t help feeling sorry for the Mongolian poachers, saying, “They see us driving these big fancy trucks and taking the bones away. As rich Europeans and North Americans coming in there, it’s hard to say, ‘Thou shalt not do these things,’ because that’s what it appears we’re doing.” See John Mangels, “Dinosaur Fossil Poachers Apparently Victimize Cleveland Museum of Natural History,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 30, 2008.

  100. “annual influx”: Andrew Lawler, “Science Hopes to Rebound in Post–Cold War Era,” Science, January 22, 1999.

  101. “to observe U.S. spy satellites”: Ibid.

  102. “whatever is left over”: In July 1991, representatives from several U.S. government technical agencies visited Mongolia to meet with counterpart agencies and to explore the potential for bilateral projects in science and technology. The team reported that the Mongolian scientists were eager to display their expertise but realistic about their lack of financial support, transportation, and communications. “Though in many fields they desperately need an introduction to modern scientific equipment and facilities, Mongolian scientists are competent, eager to learn and contribute,” the team reported in a cable to the State Department. Smithsonian representatives noted the similarities of cultural losses to those of the American Indian. The team reported that Mongolia was still using “Soviet methods of teaching” and that faculty members had not “supported government efforts to stimulate change. It is hoped that future educators will be exposed to Western influences and prompt changes within the country.” The Mongolian scientists “possess and are eager to share some impressive historical environmental data that would be of interest to workers in climate change problems,” the cable went on. State Department cable C05938924, dated July 1991, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

  103. “government paid the poor Gobi people”: Email interviews with Hollis Butts. The tugrik had “proved resilient in holding its value against most international currency” but fell by some 40 percent against the dollar in the global economic crisis of late 2008 and early 2009, according to “2013 Mongolia Investment Climate Statement,” Economic and Commercial Section, U.S. embassy, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, January 15, 2013.

  104. “We need more scientists”: Interview with Chultem “Otgo” Otgonjargal, August 2015, Ulaanbaatar. All of Otgo’s quotes in this passage are from this interview.

  CHAPTER 13: “GO GOBI”

  1. Tuvshin: Email interviews with Hollis Butts, and extensive interviews with Eric Prokopi and other fossil dealers. Butts refused to be interviewed in person, despite my offer to come to Japan. He declined to speak by phone or Skype. When we were fact-checking the original magazine story that led to this book he refused to speak directly with the checkers, and communicated only by email. Butts told me Tuvshin often brought Mongolian fossils to trade shows in his luggage. “I assumed that as long as Mongolian, Chinese, Japanese, and probably European & American customs controls had no problem with what Tuvshin carried by air, and we heard no objections from Mongolia, and Mongolian material appeared in American auction catalogs (as well as everywhere else), and Tuvshin assured us that there were no legal problems, and the Mongolian museum gift shop offered bone and teeth for sale, and the US government gave no hint of possible problems...Mongolian material was acceptable in the US.” Mongolian government officials have said that dinosaur fossils were never sold in the Natural History Museum gift shop, but others have disputed that claim. Butts added, “It seemed that was how things were done in Mongolia.” In another email he wrote, “When I asked Tuvshin about Mongolia, he answered that the Stalinist past was being rejected, a new Constitution written, and that laws from that tragic past and everything associated was in change. That seemed reasonable to me at the time.”

  2. “like a traveling salesman”: Email interview with Hollis Butts.

  3. “he was trying to get international people involved”: Ibid.

  4. “very secretive”: Interview with a dealer.

  5. Location of Ulaanbaatar: The landscape of Mongolia is the country’s greatest tourism asset. The lack of infrastructure keeps the terrain unspoiled, yet makes the stunning scenery difficult to reach. Outsiders tend to think of Mongolia as all Gobi, when, in fact the ecosystems include desert, desert steppe, and grassy steppe, which is similar to the American plains; lakes in the north, mountains in the east, and really high mountains in the west, the region of reindeer tribes and eagle hunters. Given the nation’s vastness, it would take months to tour the whole country. Oyungerel Tsedevdamba told me that once, when her brother-in-law visited, she and her husband, Jeff Falt, took him to the rolling steppe, and he asked, “But where are the mountains?” They took their book editor to the forested north and the editor asked, “But where are the camels?” Oyuna had been alive for fifty years and had lived in Mongolia for most of them and still hadn’t seen the flat steppe of the east.

  6. “one of the great empty spaces”: Novacek, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs.

  7. Traffic: In the summer of 2015 in Ulaanbaatar, I met a Utah geologist, Cari Johnson, who had been working summers in Mongolia since the 1990s. At Millie’s, an expat cafe, she told me she loves working in the Gobi because “Mongolia is the most complicated stratigraphy there is.” Using a notebook and pen she sketched a crude map, lining off the country not as geographical regions, like provinces or states, but rather as rock regions—“Siberian craton,” “plateau,” “Cretaceous (old),” “pretty old,” and “really really old.” The western Gobi is the youngest, the eastern Gobi the oldest, she explained. The Flaming Cliffs and the Nemegt Basin, in the southern Gobi, where T. bataar was found, were somewhere in the middle. Much of the country had yet to be mapped. “It’s totally different from working in the western U.S., where you have a hundred and fifty years of good, solid geological data,” she told me. The public was only beginning to realize that Ulaanbaatar, a city of nearly two million people living and working in a hodgepodge of structures, sits atop active geologic faults. A large earthquake would be “catastrophic,” Johnson said. She had been working in the Gobi for so long she was “almost a lizard.” She answered her local cell phone “Baina”—“I’m here.” By now, she knew that in Ulaanbaatar, savvy pedestrians plan their day around which street they refused to cross. In the early days of capitalism the city had no crosswalks because the citizens had no cars. Now that the streets were choked Johnson looked to the locals: if they started to walk, she hustled in among them, trying not to be the last to cross, or she looked for a distinguished-looking older Mongolian who theoretically commanded more respect and stood less of a chance of being struck. When Bolor Minjin heard about this strategy she said, “This is what Mongolians face every day and every hour. It has become part of their life. They found a way to adjust to things that didn’t used to be a problem.” One day on Peace Avenue, UB’s Broadway, Johnson and I ran into an Am
erican, a Florida man who now lived in the city. Watching all the vehicles stream past he said, with obvious glee, “Look at all this traffic. That’s capitalism!” Another afternoon, Johnson and I left the Blue Sky and crossed a side street, Jamyan, where a new building was going up. New buildings were always going up in UB; it wasn’t unusual for the developers to run out of money and leave a project windowless and unfinished, plastic sheeting flapping in the wind. That summer, construction cranes stood like sculpture throughout the city, moving not an inch. When work did resume it was often shoddy, and safety standards were often ignored. The savvy pedestrian had to look up a lot and down a lot because tools fell from the sky and manhole covers went missing, removed by those who took shelter underground in the winter.

  8. Mint-green building: On one of the days when I visited, in August 2015, a family was selling vegetables from the trunk of their car in the gravel parking lot behind Tuvshin’s building. In the basement, which had been turned into a hip-hop studio, teenagers waited to participate. Upstairs, on the fourth floor, Bobo, Tuvshin’s widow, was sitting on an office sofa, thumbing out a message on her cell phone. After her husband died, she had maintained the family travel business. She had on sky-blue pants, a striped sweater, and tan sneakers. Her lipstick was coral and her earrings resembled blue rhinestones. Her eyeglasses were pushed on top of her head. Behind her, in tall glass cabinets, stood enormous purple geodes. We spoke through a translator. The look that came over Bobo’s face when I asked about Tuvshin’s dinosaur business can be described only as panic. She and a relative had already been detained by the police for weeks. The case was still open.