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8:40 a.m. - Base Camp, Ulansuhai
Dave
prospects the seemingingly endless
red
Cretaceous badlands.
We head out
from Ulansuhaifollowing the dirt
road north, three vehicles, with
the Chinese team in the white
Jeep in the lead. A strong wind
picked up at about 7a.m. and already
the sky is hazy with dust. The
team's enthusiasm is impervious
to the gale.
Paul: "I can't
believe how much outcrop there
is. I had no idea there was so
much outcrop…"
Mike can hardly contain his eagerness
to begin prospecting. He talks
non-stop. "This feels like the
first day of school - we've got
all our stuff ready, we've been
looking forward to it for weeks,
we're a little nervous, we're
not sure what it's going to be
like…"
Although Paul
made a series of preliminary trips
to the area, he had not been able
to visit the outcrop. Along the
road on either side, red Cretaceous
(dinosaur age) rock pokes through
gravelly Quaternary (recent) coverage.
Brick red with faint stripes,
any of these red hills could contain
a dinosaur…. But how fossiliferous
is the area?
4/24
6:00 a.m.
Base Camp, Ulansuhai
Field Day 3
First there
is the wind, coursing and gusting.
Next there is the flapping of
canvas, undulating and rippling.
Soon the generator will start,
putt-putt-puttering. Then people's
footfalls will crunch against
the gravel, and the sounds of
the morning will begin. But now,
in the minutes before the sun
rises, except for the wind, it
is quiet and gray.
Tiny green leaves on otherwise
dry shrubs, strange bright purple
cones protruding from the ground,
and an occasional explosion of
yellow flowers all signal that
spring has arrived, but otherwise,
it looks like winter: gray, cold,
flat and sunless with the dust
in the air.
The
team pauses to calibrate their
GPSs - Global Satellite Positioning
units. The small devices use satellite
signals to plot longitude and
latitude points - great tools
to keep people from getting lost
while prospecting, or marking
a new discovery so it can be found
again. (from left: Fabrice, Andy,
Gabe, Paul, Dave)
This first
week at camp our plan is to explore
outcrop by visiting fossil sites
described by geologists who mapped
the area. Tan Lin was one of these
geologists, and he knows the outcrop
well. To date, however, the outcrop
- with the exception of a few
fragments - has been relatively
afossiliferous. Fossils - wood,
bone or otherwise - are hard to
find. Even in places where previous
geologists have found bone, fossils
are scrappy and hard to come by.
Our first
day of prospecting on the 22nd
began windy and chilly. Moment
by moment the wind grew to a gale
and the sky was increasingly clouded
with dust. By midday the horizon
had disappeared. We ate lunch
in the trucks - cold meat-filled
buns, hard-boiled eggs, and instant
noodle soup. Despite the weather
we made stop after stop to hike
across gorgeous - and nearly barren
- outcrop.
From the
first three days of prospecting,
the best finds so far are a toe
bone of a carnivorous dinosaur
(found by Dave Varricchio), and
a jaw of a juvenile Protoceratops,
which I found the second day.
The
tiny jaw of a juvenile Protoceratops.
The tooth row begins on the upper
left side. This beaked dinosaur
was first discovered during expeditions
led by Roy Chapman Andrews
in the 1920s and 30s.
We are working
two levels (ages) of rock in this
area; both are bright red with
green and gray stripes. The older,
Lower Cretaceous beds seem to
be harder and have a higher relief
- more cliffs and high hills.
The younger, Upper Cretaceous
beds are softer sediments and
the hills are lower and flatter.
These younger beds preserved the
juvenile Protoceratops
jaw.
Both of these
time horizons - the Lower and
Upper Cretaceous - are capped
in places by dark volcanic rock.
As a result, throughout the red
dinosaur age beds you can find
shards of volcanic glass, obsidian,
jasper and enormous geodes.
Despite the
challenge, the team is in good
spirits. Andy is chomping at the
bit to find "some good bone";
his long legs carry him far across
the badlands each prospecting
stop. Paul, Dave and I - veterans
of the 1995 Morocco Expedition,
during which it took 40 days of
hard prospecting to find our first
skeleton, feel we will need to
do two things to crack the formation:
- Cover
as much ground as possible on
foot
- Move around
to different locations - even
if this means potentially moving
or leaving our fantastic, but
cumbersome, base camp.
Blow
out on Day 1! Dave's boot had
a complete blow out the first
day of prospecting. The sole came
unattached from the rest of the
boot. Not a worry for Dave, though,
who remedied the situation with
epoxy and duct tape.
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