Race Against Time for Dinosaurs

Pagmin Narmandakh shuffles through the Gobi Desert in her bedroom slippers, marching over the bones of dinosaurs slumbering in an ancient seabed just below the silty surface.

One of Mongolia’s top paleontologists, she has been exploring the Gobi for more than 30 years. With her well-trained eye, she makes finding prehistoric relics seem easy. She has found giant tarbosaurs and tiny archaic turtles; today on her way to a dig in progress, she plucks 70-million-year-old mollusks from the sand as casually as picking seashells off the beach.

But as she crests a hill to the excavation site, she makes an unwelcome discovery. Where there was a skeleton of a toothy, meat-eating tarbosaur, there is now just a crude hole hacked in the ground. Left behind are empty boxes of gypsum plaster used for jacketing the bones, rolls of packing tape and aluminum foil, and jeep tracks so fresh the fierce Gobi winds have yet to erase them.

“Oh,” says Narmandakh, finding it suddenly harder to breathe in the 100-degree heat. “It’s been robbed!”

She kicks a rock into the ragged hole and hurries to the next site.

Another hole.

The duck-billed skull and the front arms of a long-necked saurolophus have been plundered. A rib juts out of the broken red earth, and other bones lie shattered across the hillside.

“This is my territory,” she says, hands on hips, surveying the area known as “Narmandakh’s Field” because of her discoveries here. The sandy sediment hides a graveyard of dinosaurs, from the horned-nosed protoceratops with a bony ruff on its neck to the rarer ostrich-like gallimimus.

The isolation and aridity of the southern Gobi have protected the dinosaur remains, making the area a time capsule cherished by paleontologists.

While researchers in other countries were trying to extract information from fragments of bone or eggshell, not long ago scientists here could literally trip over a skull sticking out of the sandstone.

But now the dinosaur snatchers have arrived. Seven sites have been raided here in Bugaan Tsav, where myriad finds in the past decade have filled important blanks in the story of time.

“Mongolia is one of the world’s great places for dinosaurs,” says Michael Novacek , a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History and author of “Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs.”

Recent discoveries in the region have bolstered old theories that birds evolved from dinosaurs, yielded a cornucopia of new details about tiny rodentlike creatures that outlived the dinosaurs to evolve into animals we know today, and led to new theories about dinosaurs’ extinction.

But now that scientists must compete with raiders for first crack at the valuable finds, part of the dinosaurs’ story may remain unwritten.

The popularity of the film “Jurassic Park” heightened interest in paleontologists’ work but also spurred private collectors to pay millions of dollars for prehistoric remains. Last month, a collector bid $8 million for a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in an Internet auction. The same week, the FBI recovered from Europe an unrelated T. rex jawbone stolen in 1994 from a laboratory drawer in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology.

After the skeletons lay undiscovered and undisturbed for nearly 100 million years, it is a bitter irony that the search for dinosaurs has evolved into a race against time.

The wonder of dinosaurs stretches across time, age and myth. Mongolian nomads who happened upon the enormous bones in the Gobi passed down tales of giant dragons who lived in the sky, and died when they touched the Earth.

Fossils are almost everywhere, from prehistoric mammal sites such as the La Brea tar pits near downtown Los Angeles to the spine of the Rocky Mountains, through South America and across Europe and Asia. And everywhere there are people who want to possess them.

“Dinosaurs are grand and bizarre creatures that excite people,” Novacek says. “They represent a lost world. For me, they are so fascinating because elements of our modern world emerged in the time of dinosaurs, things common now like flowering plants and birds. They demonstrate in multidimensional terms where we come from. We are all rooted in the time of the dinosaurs.”

It wasn’t until earlier this century that Mongolia became known as a cradle of dinosaur life, and then it was only discovered by accident.

In the 1920s, American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews led an expedition to the Gobi for the American Museum of Natural History in search of traces of prehistoric humans. A swashbuckling adventurer who may have inspired the character of Indiana Jones, he arrived in the Gobi with 23 cars, 150 camels and dozens of porters.

It was at Bayan Tsag, a dramatic red sandstone outcropping he dubbed “the Flaming Cliffs” for its burning color at sunset, that he stumbled upon relics of the creatures who roamed the Earth millions of years before man.

Andrews’ team found some of the first intact dinosaur eggs and excavated complete dinosaur skeletons remarkably well preserved. (Those skeletons now stand in the museum in New York.)

Andrews returned several more times to prospect for paleontological treasures until 1928, when Mongolia’s Communist leaders shut out Western scientists. It wasn’t until 1990 that the doors opened once again. But in the meantime, Mongolian scientists such as Narmandakh who were trained in the former Soviet Union continued the search.

“I was just a country girl,” Narmandakh says of the time she was selected in 1966 to study paleontology in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. “No one really knew what paleontology was in Mongolia. They said I was going to study history!”

Now, Narmandakh and her colleagues at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences are experts on the Gobi--with its heat, pelting sandstorms and spaces so wide you can see the curve of the planet.

Narmandakh, 52, moves slowly but steadily, like the ancient turtles that are her specialty. This is partly because her new canvas shoes gave her blisters, forcing her to abandon them for her slippers, but also the better for her to scan the arid ground. She wanders slowly into a canyon, then suddenly materializes on the top of a red sandstone spire, silhouetted in the distance against the wide blue sky. She waves, signaling yet another discovery.

“The sun is hot. The earth is baking. You can hardly breathe,” she says, describing her years of field work in the inhospitable steppes and sands of the Gobi. “But I’m no different from an American or Japanese or Russian scientist. It’s so exciting every time you find something. It keeps you coming back.”

In her forays into the desert with Russian, Polish and, more recently, Japanese teams, Narmandakh has unearthed 71 freshwater turtles, giant tarbosaurs--the Mongolian cousins of T. rex--the gallimimus, and more dinosaur eggs than she can count. In 1994, Narmandakh made her most significant find: 16 protoceratops hatchlings grouped together in a nest, providing important clues not only to how some dinosaurs gave birth and tended their young like birds but also hints as to how some dinosaurs died.

The 16 babies were all facing one direction and clustered on top of one another as if they were scrambling to get out of the nest, suggesting they were buried alive in a sand slide.

At the same site, a Polish-Mongolian expedition excavated two dinosaurs preserved in mid-combat--a velociraptor attacking a sheep-sized protoceratops--providing a rare freeze-frame from the past.

During their eight expeditions to Mongolia, the team from the American Museum of Natural History found many other dinosaurs that died around the same time in the southern Gobi, strengthening the hypothesis that there was “a catastrophic moment” that caused a massive sand slide that entombed and mummified the creatures.

Narmandakh scoffs at science fiction movies that show humans together with dinosaurs. But she feels as if she knows them. “I have seen back 65 million years ago,” Narmandakh says. “I have seen what the climate and the plants were like then, how the dinosaurs behaved. It’s like I was living in the Cretaceous Period.”

While scientists these days are aided by satellite maps and global-positioning systems, they still rely mostly on the skills and implements that the Andrews’ expedition used: sharp eyes, whisk brooms and dental tools. Tiny pieces of bone or shell often point the way to something larger hidden nearby, and Narmandakh shows little interest in anything less than a whole clutch of eggs, or an entire dinosaur in situ. She stoops to examine a large piece of turtle carapace, then tosses it over her shoulder with a simple pronouncement: “No good.”

But the remarkable preservation also makes it easier for poachers to retrieve the specimens, and the hunt is becoming harder.

On this hot summer day, Narmandakh has returned to Tugrugeen Shireh, the site of her hatchlings and the fighting dinosaurs, looking for a skeleton she had reburied to hide it from poachers. A few weeks before, a hadrosaur she had been working on was stolen by thieves who left a trail of gypsum chips.

As she scuffles around the hard-packed hill, a shiny motorcycle buzzes down the slope. Two young men in traditional Mongolian dress dismount and tell her the area has been bought by a tour company--it is now off limits to outsiders, even scientists. On the cover of the company’s tourist brochure: a photo of Narmandakh’s hatchlings.

There is little she can do but leave, steaming mad. The more sites are marked on tourist maps, the greater the challenge will be for scientists. There are no clear conservation laws in Mongolia, and even the government-run Academy of Sciences has little sway in protecting sites or stopping sales.

If an unlocked drawer in a California museum lab is an irresistible temptation for someone who wants to make a buck, then what must the allure be in one of the world’s poorer countries, where the bones are plentiful if you know where to look?

Narmandakh doesn’t know exactly who’s buying the skeletons or how they make it out of the country, but the money trail leads to China and Japan.

The looters have rough knowledge of how to pack bones, but their technique is sloppy.

It’s clear, she says, that the poachers care only about the money, not the science. “They come here and take the skeletons,” she says, “and in the process, they destroy them.”