Jim Clark

Dawn broke slowly at Naran Bulak, the overcast sky shielding our sleepy group from the desert sun. We lingered all morning at this verdant oasis, bathing one at a time at the pipe from which the frigid spring waters emerge, its flow trickling from there down the grassy slope. After we filled our empty water tanks we took our places in the vehicles that had become our daytime homes and started on our way to our destination for today, Ukhaa Tolgod at the other end of the Nemegt Valley.

Ukhaa Tolgod is without doubt one of the greatest fossil sites in the world (and one of the most difficult to pronounce.) Entombed beneath its unassuming orange hills lie a superabundance of dinosaurs and their eggs, tiny skeletons of lizards and mammals, and rare spectacles such as embryonic dinosaurs and dinosaur parents preserved sitting on top of their nests. When we discovered Ukhaa in 1993 its wealth was apparent immediately, and to our surprise we found that enough "new" fossils were exposed each year to warrant continued vigilance. A field season in the Gobi would be incomplete without a thorough sweep of its surfaces to see what the wind and rain have uncovered since the year before.

The speedy trip to Ukhaa from Naran Bulak was a pleasant contrast to the agony of the past two day's travails. Our caravan traveled the 110 Km along well worn tracks with dispatch, arriving in the late afternoon at distinctive "camel humps" formed by two rounded spires of orange sandstone. Soon the trucks were unloaded and camp was set up, marred only by the minor annoyance of a leaky gas drum that had soaked one of our tents during the bumpy ride. The crates of supplies were placed close together in the center of camp so they can be covered with a tarp each night in anticipation of a possible sudden; two of the crates will be used as a screen for our stoves against the wind.

Champing at the bit after so many days on the road, we soon spread out over the slopes near camp in search of fossils. We walked slowly and methodically, staring at the ground in search of the tiniest glimmer of bone, picking up anything even vaguely suspicious and poring over it until we discovered whether it was a "keeper" or only a pseudofossil, tricking our eyes. For some of us this is the sixth year we will be working at Ukhaa, and our search images are by now finely honed.

Our brief search in the twilight was rewarded with the skull of a small dinosaur called Protoceratops, as well as two skulls of a small, primitive, rodent-like mammal called a multituberculate, and an important part of the skull of a kind of mammal close to the ancestry of all placental mammals, such as ourselves. At any other dinosaur-age site in the world these specimens would be treasured for their rarity and completeness, but here at Ukhaa Tolgod finding them is the work of a moment. Our appetite for fossils whetted, we retire to camp at sunset to ponder what surprises Ukhaa holds for tomorrow. For the first time on this year's journey, we will sleep tonight contented as we are in a familiar -- a place to relax at night, arise early and work hard all day at our favorite fossil locality on the planet.

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