Peter Makovicky

I woke up to the flapping of my tent fly in the strong wind. After several minutes of looking for my wrist watch, I lay back in my sleeping bag. It was 6:00 AM but I didn't have to get up yet. We are at Ukhaa Tolgod, and I could relax for a while longer and get charged for a day of prospecting for fossils. An hour later I struggled into my shorts and T-shirt, but the leaden sky and chilly wind that met me outside of the tent sent me back in search of warmer clothing.

In spite of the cold front blowing through, our crew was cheery this morning. No long hours of driving lay ahead, only the enjoyable task of looking for fossils, which we paleontologists, students and curators alike, cherish so much.

It is my first trip to Mongolia, and I had heard many stories about the legendary locality Ukhaa Tolgod. I have worked on the exquisite fossils collected here in previous years, and it was with much anticipation that I arrived here yesterday afternoon.

Unfortunately my three hours of prospecting did not yield any wonderful specimens, and I felt a little disappointed with only a broken earpiece on my sunglasses to show for my efforts. This morning my luck changed. On the way back from our open-air restroom, I picked up a fossil millipede and the skull of a multituberculate, a primitive rodent-like mammal.

The dark clouds disappeared shortly after breakfast, and the weather was great for prospecting. Strong sunlight helped us discern between bone and rock, and a steady wind kept us cool all day. We matched these good conditions with a wonderful haul of fossils. Working in the Camel Humps, named for two vertical pillars of bright red sandstone, Guillermo Rougier found a well-preserved and articulated deltatheridian (an extinct marsupial relative) as well as a number of lizard skulls/skeletons, and Jim Clark found the skeleton of a bird.

Well preserved bird-skeletons are rare in the fossil record, because the hollow bones are easily broken, so this represents an important find. Mike and Mark picked up some lizard skulls, while Amy located some small skeletons, which we she will carefully wrap in plaster jackets and extract tomorrow. The top-scorer among us was Boldra, who found no less than nine skulls of various mammals and lizards. My own discoveries amounted to a more modest total of two more multis, a dinosaur egg, and a lizard skeleton, but I was pleased for it was more than I had ever found in a single day in previous years of work in Western Canada. Indeed, the sum of our discoveries on this day alone exceeds the number of good specimens collected at some classical localities in North America during a century of paleontological work.

We celebrated the day's success with a wonderful dinner consisting of a Smithfield ham and potatoes baked over coals. Our appetites for both good fossils and good food satisfied for the night, we are relaxing around the campfire. As I write, Mike is playing his guitar for us. Tonight we will all go to sleep looking forward to tomorrow.

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