James Clark

Today we left the inferno of the deep Gobi and entered the purgatory world of its borderland. The grassy steppe is still nearly a hundred clicks beyond tonight's camp, but the hearty nomads of the Nemegt Valley are here replaced by their more sedentary brethren tending larger herds of fatter sheep and "humpier" camels and eating vegetables from a spring-fed farm near the town of Bulgan. Our departure from terra incognita was heralded by a group of German tourists out for a day trip from a tourist camp near the Flaming Cliffs, who looked askance at our filthy clothes and weather-beaten facades.

The tedium of today's journey was broken by a brief but successful visit to some lilliputian fossil localities discovered by Russian paleontologists in a wash known as Udaan Sayr. The sediments exposed here are in some sense the western welcome mat of the Flaming Cliffs, for they are composed of the same red sands -- the Djadokhta Formation -- and have some of the same fossils but are exposed in only a few small outcrops.

Some of these outcrops are reminiscent of Ukhaa Tolgod in their richness, but together they would not make up one decent-sized football field. For several years the mammal paleontologists among us have been salivating over a beautiful mammal skull from these beds, named Asiatherium, and to summarize our findings in a nutshell they now have a new specimen at which to direct their glandular secretions.

Although we saw only a few gazelles and a single wild ass today, we were treated to a performance by gazelles in this area two years ago that we will long remember. As we passed near a herd of thousands of these graceful animals they instinctively began racing our caravan, passing from left to right in front of the lead car. We responded to the challenge and sped up, to 35, then 40, then 50 km/hour, but they just bounced faster over the rugged landscape to catch up with their leaders.

For half an hour we raced along, sometimes coming within a hair's breadth of them as they leaped in front of us, until the entire herd had crossed over and then loped off into the distance. One of our Mongolian colleagues explained this behavior as the gazelles' strategy to avoid being surrounded by packs of wolves.

We ended our day by setting up camp at a site named Chimney Butte, another small outcrop of the Djadokhta Formation, from which we collected a beautiful Velociraptor skeleton five years ago. The round hill above us bears no resemblance to a chimney and hints only faintly at what passes for a butte back home, and its name is instead an homage by Dashzeveg to a famous fossil locality in Wyoming. Should we discover a new fossil locality in Wyoming some day we will return the favor, perhaps christening some lonely wash "Hsanda Gol" or "Bayn Dzak" to the bewilderment of local inhabitants.

Chimney Butte will be our base camp for the next several days, from which we will foray eastward to the "Famous" Flaming Cliffs (FFC to the cognicenti) and westward to the white sands of Tugrugeen Shireh. The Flaming Cliffs are justly famous as the site at which the American Museum's Central Asiatic Expedition discovered the first dinosaur nests in 1923, and they are now a mecca for paleontologists and those tourists willing to go a short distance off the beaten path.

It was at Tugrugeen that the Polish-Mongolian expedition discovered the "fighting dinosaurs," a Velociraptor skeleton preserved embracing a skeleton of a hapless Protoceratops, its claws embedded in the latter's abdomen. As at Ukhaa Tolgod, such animated finds suggest that these victims were buried alive by sudden sand slides or storms, capturing forever a vivid moment in the life of these long-dead animals.

As I end this penultimate dispatch the wind is blowing hard, as usual, and the last rays of sun light up the western sky. We've witnessed some odd things in the skies the last few nights, and tonight we're going to stay up late to take a closer look.

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