O
NE OF THE most exciting moments of the trip for me
was the discovery of the partial jawbone of an Alectrosaurus.
This rare, 6m-long carnivore was related to T. rex and
lived in Mongolia about 80 million years ago, during the Late
Cretaceous. A small piece of unusual reddish stone with pits along
it had caught my attention and 30 minutes of carefully brushing
sand away had revealed the front-left part of a lower jaw, which
still had a single tooth attached to it. The pits I’d spotted were
where nerves once attached to each tooth.
Alectrosaurus was first discovered in the Chinese part of the
Gobi in 1923, and though teeth are common here, skeletal remains
such as this had not been found in Mongolia since the 1970s.
We spent much of the rest of that afternoon digging out a ped-
estal of dirt around this important specimen and then wrapping
it in hessian and plaster for its return to Ulaanbaatar.
“There was a hope and expectation that I’d personally uncover
something of interest. I was not disappointed,” says Clint Coker,
57, a pharmacist from Noosa Heads, Queensland, who had no
prior experience of digging or palaeontology, and whose top find
was a series of dinosaur footprints. “Every day prospecting was
like being a kid on a treasure hunt... Investigating every possible
find, carefully brushing away the soil and exposing dinosaur
remains, knowing that you were the first person to see them and
that they were laid down 80 million years previously.”
Alhough Tsogtbaatar was accompanied by some palaeontology
students and assistants, we were unable to collect larger specimens116 Australian GeographicWalkaboutDinosaurs of the Gobi
we found, such as the articulated legs of a duck-billed hadrosaur.
We reburied these to hide them from fossil poachers – an
ever-present threat in the Gobi (fossils are often hurriedly extracted
and smashed, with flashier parts, such as skulls and claws, sent
overseas to feed the black market for Mongolian fossils). But small
and important specimens, such as pieces of rarer carnivorous
dinosaurs and anything not well represented in the academy’s
collections, were carefully encased in plaster and collected.
Each year the winds and sandstorms scour off the surface rocks,
exposing a new layer of fossils. This means there are constantly
new things to find, but also anything left on the surface is likely
to have disintegrated and blown away by the following summer.
All of us Australians on the dig were astounded at the fossils
we left behind in the Gobi. At some of the sites we were literally
tripping over pieces of herbivorous hadrosaurs – the kind of
fossils experts can only dream of finding in Australia, where any
small piece of dinosaur is a hard-won treasure. Here, Tsogtbaatar
tells us, they already have large numbers of excellent specimens
of these species and have no need of more in their collections.
Robbin Waterhouse, a retired doctor from Townsville,
Queensland, said his interest in joining the dig was a long-held
desire to see the Gobi and an excuse to wander in the wilderness.
“The most surprising aspect of the trip for me was the ease of
finding specimens, not to mention that we discarded anything
that wasn’t rare or in first-class condition,” he says. “But a close
second was having Dr Tsogtbaatar with us as resident expert.”Seventy million years ago the Gobi was a river delta with seasonal
flooding. In this illustration, apex predator Tarbosaurus – a relative of
T. rex – looks out on a scene, which includes feathery Velociraptors
(lower left), duck-billed hadrosaurs (lower right) and a herd of
speedy Gallimimus (upper right).