LA TIMES: Mongolian dinosaur thefts (long)

[Betty Cunningham <bettyc@flyinggoat.com>]

http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/FRONT/t000071388.html
Wednesday, August 11, 1999     COLUMN ONE 

Race Against Time for Dinosaurs 
 Scientists must compete with looters in Gobi, where past finds have
filled important blanks in chronology of evolution. 
By MAGGIE FARLEY, Times Staff Writer           
  
UGAAN TSAV, Mongolia--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." 

 
-- 
Flying Goat Graphics
http://www.flyinggoat.com
(Society of Vertebrate Paleontology member)
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