The rain is falling in buckets, and little impromptu rivers are popping up in the sand. My ger is leaking badly on one side. This expedition was supposed to be on a mix of hot sand, hills and rocks. But water and mud?
Believe it or not, we are in the middle of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, in July. Storms this time of year here usually take the form of dust. This, this is a deluge of historic proportions. Locals say they haven’t seen so much rain so quickly in over a century.
Earlier in the day, we had been hunting dinosaur bones. Our pack of eagle-eyed spotters had driven Infiniti Motor Company SUV’s several miles from camp for the search.
Camp at Three Camel Lodge is pretty luxurious. My private ger (another term for yurt) had a toilet and shower. There were towels and a king-sized bed with fresh sheets. There was electricity and lights. There were warm meals and café lattes in the communal dining area. The place was on par with a five-star hotel.
After my trip to get here, I needed five stars. I flew New York to Tokyo, Japan; to Seoul, South Korea; to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; to Dalanzadgad in the Gobi. Then it was another 40-mile drive at 3 a.m. to Three Camel Lodge! To say I am jetlagged and exhausted in a twilight zone type of stupor is an understatement.
In the 1920s, former Explorers Club President Roy Chapman Andrews, largely thought to be the real Indiana Jones, mounted a major dinosaur fossil search in this region and found bones and eggs from a number of species. Earlier in the summer, The Explorers Club’s Hong Kong Chapter, sponsored by Infiniti and using drones and spectral and thermal imaging, spent 20 days retracing Andrews’ steps and found more than 250 new dig sites and hundreds of new bones.
The Explorers Club is a 114-year-old worldwide organization of 3,700 or so people who have contributed to education advancement in the fields of science, adventure and exploration. Many have done firsts. Members have included the late Sir Edmund Hillary, first to climb Mt. Everest; John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth; Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon; and Don Walsh, first to the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench. You get the picture.
Why am I here? As an Explorers Club Fellow and adventure journalist, this was a trip I could not pass up.
Dinosaur bone hunting is new to me. The closest I have come to something like this is meteorite hunting in West Texas. After a few days of searching, we finally found some space rocks in the famous Odessa Crater with Discovery Channel’s “Meteorite Men” TV show hosts Geoffrey Notkin and Steve Arnold. What a thrill to find and hold my first meteorite! It was 4.5-billion years old and had come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The big question now: Would we find anything out here? Would I be able to experience the same excitement holding a new-found dinosaur bone fossil as I did with the meteorite?
Looking for white fossil bones amidst white calcified rocks is not easy. Luckily, we had experts from the Mongolian Institute of Paleontology and Geology (IPG) with us to examine what we’ve spied, then tell us whether the specimens are indeed from a dinosaur.
If we find something, can we keep it? Absolutely not. It’s a crime to pilfer dinosaur bones in Mongolia and is punishable by possible jail time. Anything deemed authentic would need to be sent to the lab for testing, then, if authentic, donated to a local museum.
The four-wheel-drive Infinitis we were testing – QX-60s, QX-80s and all-new QX-50s – were all adept off-road. Now I am not specifically an auto journalist, as many on our expedition are, and I live in New York, so I don’t even own a car. But I know an SUV that handles well from one that doesn’t. These Infinitis handled extremely well off-road and were fun to drive, especially the QX-50.
On day three, we had driven our Infinitis maybe 15 miles out from base camp to Flaming Cliffs, a beautiful hilly area peppered with brown and white rocks. Suddenly, one of the expedition members called out that he had spotted something. The Mongolian IPG paleontologists hurried over to examine the find.
After brushing off topsoil sediment and after some discussion, IPG’s Badamkhatan Zorigt determined the bleached white remnants likely to be dinosaur fossils more than 80 million years old, probably juvenile velociraptor twins. GPS coordinates were taken of the find, and the site was covered by a few rocks to prevent poachers from seeing it.
After that, there were a few more finds! At that point, I experienced my own mix of emotions. By God, there really are bones in them there hills! How amazing. But why hadn’t I been the one to find one? I was both elated for the group but frustrated for myself.
Near the end of the day, just when I was feeling the most fatigue, I spied a small bleached-white obstacle out the corner of my left eye. It’s probably another calcified rock, I thought, but I bent down to pick it up anyway, then did a quick-and-dirty test to determine whether it might be a bone fossil. I licked my finger, then put the finger on the specimen to see if it would stick. Sure enough, it did!
I called Zorigt over immediately for an inspection. He scrutinized it, eyed it with suspicion until finally saying, “I’m not sure, but this is worth taking to the lab.”
Bottomline, I’m still not certain whether my find is a real dinosaur fossil, but it could be. Only the lab will know. And since it is amongst so many other samples we found that went to the lab, I will never know.
But just the 50/50 chance that it is real was worth the entire trip.
