OLogy Cards > Roy Chapman Andrews

The First AMNH Scientists to "Go Gobi"
In the early 1920s, Roy Chapman Andrews led a team of scientists on a fossil-hunting expedition to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. The goal was to find the remains of modern man. They didn't find any fossils of early humans. But the team did make important discoveries, including nests of dinosaur eggs, the first-known Oviraptor, and the first-known Protoceratops. In fact, the species name for the dinosaur pictured is Protoceratops andrewsi. It was named in honor of the expedition leader!

Mongolia's Funniest Home Videos?
During Roy Chapman Andrews' 1925 expedition to the Gobi Desert, his team took many movies of the excavation. In one of these black and white films, Andrews and Walter Granger, the chief paleontologist, recreated their discovery of a nest of dinosaur eggs they had found two years earlier. In the 1920s, when these films were shown in America, people became wildly interested in paleontology. In today's high-tech world, however, the men in these grainy films look more like silent movie comedians than trailblazing fossil-hunters and explorers.