and head of the MAS’s Institute of Paleontology and Geology
in Ulaanbaatar. The whole trip lasted 17 days, with eight days
camping hundreds of kilometres from anywhere in the eastern
Gobi. The rest of the time was spent in the capital Ulaanbaatar
and visiting a series of significant fossil and geological sites, as well
as the spectacular Gurvan Saikhan (‘three beauties’) mountains.
Mongolia is a country of contrasts; 800,000 of the 1.3 million
inhabitants of the capital still live in traditional circular ‘tents’ in
the city’s sprawling ger district. Easy to pack away and transport,
these gers or yurts have been the favoured dwellings of Central
Asian nomads for millennia – but today they seem at odds with
Ulaanbaatar’s glitzy new skyscrapers and shopping malls, filled
with luxury goods, shops and fine restaurants with wide selections
of European wines.
Since the fall of communism in the 1990s, mining has brought
new wealth and rapid urbanisation to a country of only 3 million
people, 45 per cent of whom are found in Ulaanbaatar, the
only sizeable city. Much of the rest of the population still lives a
traditional nomadic lifestyle, tending sheep and camels across the
steppe and desert that covers the majority of Mongolia.
Oyu Tolgoi, a massive copper and gold mine in the south Gobi
near the border with China (owned in large part by a subsidiary
of British–Australian multinational Rio Tinto), is a great example
of the wealth pouring in. It is claimed that this mine – supported
by the new airport into which we flew from Ulaanbaatar – will
account for 30 per cent of Mongolia’s entire GDP when running
at full capacity in 2021.
We had begun our adventure with several days in Ulaanbaatar.
There we visited the Gandan Monastery, some museums and a
shopping mall housing the incredible MAS dinosaur collection
while the natural history museum is being renovated. We
also spent time in the fossil preparatory lab of the Institute of
Paleontology and Geology, stacked with specimens that techni-
cians were slowly chipping out of great slabs of rock and sand.
114 Australian Geographic
(^1) Government House at the centre of capital city, Ulaanbaatar, is
the home of the Mongolian parliament. The city’s sprawling ger district
can be seen on the distant hills.^2 Shaped by the fl ow of water, erosional
‘badland’ environments in the Gobi Desert are a brilliant source of
Cretaceous-era fossils.^3 Renowned Mongolian dinosaur hunter
Dr Tsogtbaatar Khishigjav spends months of each year in the Gobi.
The Gobi has a population density of just 0.4 people per square
kilometre. It is a true desert with less than 193mm of rainfall
a year and average maximum summer temperatures above 35°C.
The Gobi Desert