Paleontology: Gobi’s Treasure of Bones

The 35 tons of fossils might well have represented the lifetime discoveries of any of the delegates to the Paris paleontologic conference. Included in the collection were the oldest complete mammal skulls on record, bones of an entirely new species, and the largest group of complete dinosaur skeletons ever assembled. The scientific treasure, described to the conference by Polish Paleontologist Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, represented the findings of Polish-Mongolian groups that went into the Gobi Desert on three successive summertime expeditions between 1963 and 1965. “Superfantastic,” said American Museum of Natural History Paleontologist Malcolm McKenna after hearing the Kielan-Jaworowska report.

At least 18 of the 100 million-year-old Cretaceous-period skulls that turned up during the Gobi diggings belonged to rodentlike, leaf-eating mammals that later became extinct. Another twelve were skulls of insectivores that eventually evolved into higher mammals that still roam the earth today. They are the most primitive placental mammals ever discovered in so excellent a state of preservation, and may cast a new light on the evolutionary process.

The expedition also tracked down some large fossil game: the complete and nearly complete skeletons of eleven dinosaurs, one different from any ever found before. The fossilized skeleton of one large carnivorous beast had forelimbs about 8 ft. long, 21 times the length of the forelimbs of the largest meat-eating dinosaur previously known. “I think we have here a new family of dinosaurs,” says Professor Kielan-Jaworowska. “We haven’t even named it yet.” The scientists also found the final resting place of a 65-ft.-long sauropod dinosaur, closely related to the giant Brontosaurus and Brachiosaurus that thrived during the Jurassic period, 140 million years ago. It was discovered lying on its back in an uppermost rock layer of the more recent Cretaceous period.

Many of the Gobi fossils are still embedded in blocks of rock that the Polish paleontologists shipped back to Warsaw. They will have to be chipped out and studied before they can be placed in their proper evolutionary order. “It is much too soon to be making any sweeping conclusions,” says Professor Kielan-Jaworowska. And some of the conclusions may never be reached. The Outer Mongolian government insisted that half the expedition’s fossils be kept in the capital city of Ulan Bator, where there may be no highly trained and properly equipped specialists to study them. Unless these fossils can be examined by competent paleontologists, the Poles fear, they may well be lost to science.