Science: Mongolia Easy-Chaired

Last week’s fighting in Jehol meant only hindrance to Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews, famed digger of fossils in Mongolia. Dr. Andrews recognized the State of Manchukuo last autumn, arranged with the Regency to continue his Mongolian diggings. As soon as Japan pacifies the region, he will dart in with Dodge cars, camels and naturalists. He has closed the Peking headquarters from which he led five expeditions between 1921 and 1930 at a cost of $600,000.

While waiting to resume work, Dr. Andrews last week watched his The New Conquest of Central Asia go on sale in Manhattan. It is Vol I of a series of twelve which the American Museum of Natural History is publishing concerning Dr. Andrews’ Central Asiatic work. The other eleven are specialized & academic—geology, topography, fossils, reptiles, fishes, mammals of Mongolia and China. The New Conquest of Central Asia recounts for laymen the lively adventures of the expeditions. It describes the nomad life of the Gobi Desert, the thrill of discovering fossils, the troubles of dealing with bandits. It is a narrative for those who must do their exploring from an easy-chair. But Dr. Andrews fears few easy-chairmen will buy a book that looks & sounds as scholarly as The New Conquest of Central Asia. It costs $10.

Fun on the expeditions often consisted of racing desert animals. The Gobi Desert has a rock floor which in many places is smooth enough for a motor car to travel at top speed. Thus Dr. Andrews found that the Mongolian wild ass attains a speed of 40 m.p.h., the wolf 36 m.p.h., the antelope 60 m.p.h. Once from his moving car he shot a running buck, completely severing a hind leg. On three legs the maimed animal kept running at 25 m.p.h. for five miles, then escaped.

Once the party started to map a mirage. Another time they saw marmots pair off, stand “erect on their hind legs, grasping each other with their front paws, and dance slowly about exactly as though they were waltzing.” Once a car partially sank in quicksand. Another time, in an old quicksand bed they found the four legs of a baluchitherium, largest animal that ever lived. Each leg was as big around as a fat man. A speck of white in the prevailing red of the desert sufficed to indicate a partially exposed fossil. After a little practice the men spotted digging sites with field glasses. Having discovered a fossil, the diggers used whisk brooms and needles to disengage the item from its matrix. Dr. Andrews was usually chased away from a find. Impetuous, he was apt to use a pickaxe.

Most marvelous results of the ten years digging were dinosaur eggs, baluchitheria, and rats which lived with dinosaurs. In 1900 Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, paleontologist, predicted the finding of great fossil beds in Central Asia. That region, argued Dr. Osborn, was the dispersal point for many species of animals. Man too must have originated there. Dr. Andrews found places among the Gobi dunes where groups of humans once lived. But he could find no traces of very ancient human bones, nor of protohuman fossils. Simple Chinese use fossil bones, which they call dragon bones, for medicine. Way to test a dragon bone is to touch it to the tongue. If the sample clings to the tongue, it is genuine.

The dinosaur eggs eventually caused Dr. Andrews much vexation. George Olsen, paleontologist, discovered the first fragments. Dr. Andrews & companions “did not take his story very seriously. . . . The prospect was thrilling, but we would not let ourselves think of it tooseriously. . . .” Dr. Walter Granger, paleontologist, finally said: “No dinosaur eggs have ever been found, but the reptiles probably did lay eggs. These must be dinosaur eggs. They can’t be anything else.”

To raise money for the digging Dr. Andrews and Dr. Osborn at a breakfast in Manhattan decided to excite the public by selling a dinosaur egg to the highest bidder. Offers came from all parts of the world, including Australia and New Zealand. The Illustrated London News bid, as did the National Geographic Society. The late Colonel Austin Colgate bought the egg for $5,000. Colgate University now has it. Dr. Andrews followed up the publicity, in four months raised $286,000 for his field work.

The Colgate dinosaur egg was the only one sold. The British Museum, to which the American Museum of Natural History had sent a plaster replica of an egg gratis, refused to pay $100 for an original aged 95 million years. But in the Orient, Chinese, Mongols & Russians decided that Dr. Andrews was getting $60,000 a dozen for the eggs, and a fortune for the big bones. When he returned to Mongolia he found grafters plaguing him at every turn. He generally bullied them out of their demands.

The civil wars which hung over Peking and the route to the Gobi, impeded him more than the extortionists. During one air raid he saved his life only by hiding under a freight car. A shell fragment struck within two inches of his face. He burnt his fingers pulling the red-hot steel from the ground. En route to & from the desert bandits occasionally shot at the diggers. But there were no casualties. The late J. McKenzie Young, who had charge of the motor cars, was once attacked while driving alone. He routed the assailants by guiding his car with one hand, firing his rifle pistol-wise with the other. During the ten years’ work only two serious accidents occurred in the field. First was Dr. Andrews’ shooting himself in the thigh. The other accident was a man’s cutting a leg artery. At the very beginning of the work Dr. Andrews’ eyes became infected. Thenceforth he has been obliged to wear glasses.

Hardbitten as Dr. Andrews is, the Gobi fascinates him. Occasionally it makes him poetize. Writes he toward the end of his narrative: “Wandering over the brick-red sediments all of us eventually arrived at an isolated cone-shaped butte. From its low summit we looked down upon a relief map of rounded hillocks, tiny flat plains and miniature ravines. Almost every inch was covered with animal footprints. . . .

“For an hour I wandered over the badlands, reading the story of life and death in the desert. Sixty million years ago, when these red sediments were being deposited, the drama was the same but with different actors. Then rhinoceroses trod this ground, the gigantic Andrewsarchus, greatest of all known flesh-eating land mammals, prowled at night, and fed upon the bodies of dying titanotheres. It was a world of nightmare creatures. The high plateaus of Africa today with their open plains and sparse forests offer a convincing parallel to ancient Mongolia.

To Mongolia Dr. Andrews must return. The work needs finishing. There must be relics of man’s forerunners in that arid plateau. But digging requires money. Of onetime backers Dwight Morrow and George Fisher Baker are dead. Yet John Pierpont Morgan, John Davison Rockefeller Jr. and Mrs. Thomas Lamont, of the few who contributed the expedition’s first $250,000, remain. For present help Dr. Andrews is scanning the easy chairs.