Of Once and Future Fossils
by Ellen S. Wilson
Near the end of his scientific adventure tale, Michael Novacek pauses
to be a bit philosophical:
People, especially paleontologists, can accept extinction, renewal,
diversification, and yet more extinction as intrinsic to our evolutionary
legacy. We know that serpentine mosasaurs, segmented pill-buglike trilobites,
winged pterosaurs, long-necked sauropods, and even bigger cockroaches than
encountered in some bad hotel rooms in Hawaii are no longer around. If
there is something that the fossil record teaches us that might be somehow
attached to our “higher” sense of our place in the universe, it is that
life in all its wondrous forms does not endure.
It is a thought that would give any reader pause. After following Novacek
and his crew through years of frustration and triumph in the inhospitable
Gobi Desert, it is meaningful to stop and consider: this fossil record
that is being carefully elucidated applies to us as well.
Michael Novacek is senior vice president and provost of Science, as
well as curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York. His expeditions to Mongolia began in the summer of
1990, the first explorations of the Gobi led by Western scientists since
Roy Chapman Andrews led five expeditions in the 1920s. Andrews, also from
the American Museum, found the first dinosaur eggs as well as new dinosaurs
and mammals, but politics closed the Gobi to American scientists until
Mongolia declared its independence from the Soviet Union early in 1990.
Shortly after that, a delegation from the Mongolian Academy of Sciences
approached the American Museum, and after hasty preparations the American
Museum paleontologists began what was to be a series of remarkably productive
explorations of one of the most geographically harsh and visually stunning
places on earth.
The Flaming Cliffs were named by Andrews for the colorful badlands,
a “fantasy land of orange-red cliffs” with a remarkable array of dinosaur
fossils, including the first discovered Protoceratops andrewsi. (Protoceratops
proved to be so abundant in the Gobi, although unknown elsewhere, that
Novacek’s team called them Cretaceous sheep. As Novacek’s colleague Mark
Norell puts it, “they’re what everything else ate.”)
While there is a lot of science in Novacek’s book, the real fun is in
the adventure story, interspersed with sections that explain the paleontological
significance of their finds and discuss evolution and classification of
species. One of the first things to impress a reader is that these expeditions,
which at times seem a bit like summer camp for grown-ups, are dangerous.
Food, water, medication, every single thing the expedition might need,
has to be on the trucks. The team must include a mechanic to deal with
the frequent breakdowns, and due to the lack of parts not just in the Gobi
but in the whole of Mongolia, he has to be imaginative. Oatmeal boxes can
replace blown gaskets when necessary, for example. Fuel is carried in an
accompanying tanker, which must not travel in the blazing midday heat to
avoid incineration. Routes have to be as direct as possible across the
mapless Gobi to conserve supplies as well as time. One team member’s illness
could be a catastrophe, and there is no way to guard against such desert
hazards as sandstorms or, in a few days of grisly discomfort, biting flies.
Novacek discusses not only these specific expeditions, but touches on
other adventures that illustrate his career and shed light on the field
of paleontology and its rare moments of exhilaration. He is a well-read,
well-traveled and thoughtful person, and his writing is often lively, and
occasionally inspiring. While Novacek seems to be the sort who simply
wouldn’t say anything bad about a colleague, the camaraderie that develops
among the team members feels genuine.
After several difficult and costly expeditions, Novacek and his colleagues
are understandably discouraged by their lack of impressive finds. They
have some excellent specimens, the importance of which will not be understood
until they are studied in the laboratories back home, but the general feeling
is that the best specimens have already been removed. Andrews was there
first, followed by Sino-Swedish teams, Russians, and Polish-Mongolian teams,
and now not enough fossil wealth remains to make the current trips worthwhile.
And then, on July 15, 1993, Novacek and friends find their Xanadu.
It starts off badly. The tanker carrying fuel gets stuck in the sand.
“There was a moment of resignation, like a terrible unspoken admission
that the expedition, with its buried gas tanker, was over.” Pulling it
out does audible damage to the transmission of another vehicle, and the
tanker gets stuck again before they reach their destination. Even that
is disappointing. “The red hills and cliffs were pretty, but the area was
sowell, small. Only a couple of square miles of patchy outcrop lay before
us. Besides, we were slightly lost.” The next day, making the best of it,
the paleontologists head west toward a saddle between the hills, and as
soon as they climb out of their trucks they begin seeing fossils. “Mark
would sing out, ‘Skull!’ and, almost on cue, I would find one too.”
The discovery outweighs any other in Novacek’s or Norell’s careers,
and that realization has both prospectors shivering with excitement. “In
an area the size of a football field we had found a treasure trove that
matched the cumulative riches of all the other famous Gobi localities combined.”
It isn’t just the numbers of dinosaurs and mammals unearthed at the site
during that field season and the next that is so significant, it is the
implied narrative of the scenario itself. They have stumbled upon a nesting
site of Oviraptors that was beginning to be ravaged by a couple of Velociraptors
when something happened 80 million years ago to bring an abrupt end to
all of them. Novacek’s guess is a cataclysmic sandstorm, which he describes
in graphic and dramatic detail.
Novacek says that on grey winter days in New York, he dreams of being
back in the Gobi, and in the Gobi he dreams of a real shower, ice in his
glass, and family. Somehow the scorpions, flies and desert dehydration
serve to enhance the value of the Novacek team’s discoveries, not to mention
the pleasures of reading about them in a comfortable chair.
Ellen S. Wilson is the book review editor for Carnegie Magazine.
