Today, we pick up where we left off 60 years ago.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Roy Chapman Andrews was the
great showman of paleontology 60 years ago -- a
real-life Indiana Jones. By the time he died in
1960, he'd written a string of popular books. The
titles are marvelous: Under a Lucky
Star, Camps and Trails in
China, and Whale Hunting With Gun and
Here's an old photo of Andrews sitting in the Gobi
Desert. He wears jodhpurs, high leather boots, and
a cowboy hat. His thirty-ought-six leans against a
rock beside him. He ponders a nest of dinosaur
eggs. Andrews riveted the American imagination in
But there was meat along with the potatoes. He
joined the American Museum of Natural History when
he finished college in 1906. He was the Museum's
president when he retired in 1942. By 1921, when he
mounted his first expedition to the Gobi desert, he
was already a seasoned explorer.
The Gobi turned out to be as rich in dinosaur
remains as any place on the planet. The oddities of
climate and geology have been kind to their bones.
Andrews made spectacular finds. Here, in central
Mongolia, he located remains of the Baluchitherium.
Baluchiterium was an ancestor of the rhinoceros. He
was then believed to be the largest mammal that'd
ever walked. Andrews's trips, and those he
supervised until 1932, filled the American Museum
with dinosaur bones.
But war ended all that. The Chinese had to fight
the Japanese invasion at the same time they fought
a civil war. Then cold war followed the shooting
war. It was 1990 before the American Museum could
wangle its next invitation into the Gobi desert.
This time paleontologists went into the Gobi in
Russian-made trucks. It was only a quick run --
just two weeks in the desert itself. On one
900-mile stretch the safari encountered only one
other car. They found their way back to the Flaming
Cliffs, where Andrews had stopped to write:
... we looked down into a vast pink basin,
studded with giant buttes like strange beasts,
carved from sandstone.
There they found yet another unknown species. They
found the ancestor of the Komodo dragon. The Komodo
dragon is an 11-foot-long egg-stealing lizard,
alive today. But we find Komodo dragons only in
warm climates, far to the south. This ancestor once
feasted on dinosaur eggs. Now he reaches across
time to tell us that Mongolia was warm and tropical
50 million years ago.
The 1990 group also scouted new sites. They'll soon
go back to the Gobi for their first serious digging
in 60 years. That promises for paleontology what
the Hubble telescope promised for astronomy. But
it's more. It is Indiana Jones -- science still
wearing the cloak of romance. It is the stuff of
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Wilford, J.N., After 60 years, Scientists Return to
Fossil 'Paradise' of the Gobi. Science Times.
The New York Times, Tuesday, July 29,
1990, pp. B5 and B8.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
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