Separation and Sightings

Our season is drawing to a close. Tomorrow, Guillermo, Peter and Murphy leave for Ulaan Baatar with Namdavah in two of our Russian jeeps. They leave the rest of us here at Chimney Buttes to look at some of the classic localities around which the American Museum's Central Asiatic Expeditions first found fossils in the Gobi. It's always advisable to hit these spots even if only for a day or a few hours, as a Velociraptor skull or a dinosaur nest might have been uncovered by the intervening year rains and winds that scoured the outcrops.

Today we briefly scouted Tugrigeen Shireh where a Polish-Mongolian expeditions found the famous pair of fighting dinosaurs - a Velociraptor and a shield-headed Protoceratops locked in what was certainly mortal combat. Then we will visit the Flaming Cliffs, or Bayn Dzak, where Andrews and his team in 1922 and 1923 shook the scientific world with the discovery of dinosaur eggs. The "Cliffs" are now a frequent target for expeditions and even a popular summer tourist spot. But a visit by our team is always worthwhile. In 1994, we found an exquisite Velociraptor skeleton at this site.

It has been to date a highly successful season. The bounty of which we will only understand fully when our hundreds of fossils arrive in New York and are prepared and studied. This is our last evening of reportage, but the magic of this place and the wide open Mongolian skies distract us from our keyboard, and make stargazing addictive and unavoidable.

Thankfully, we have a lot of work left to do. Bayarta! We're gone.

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