Labels:text | font | paper | screenshot | document OCR: The fossil history of Asia was largely unknown at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the discovery of early human remains in the 1880s led to scientific interest in the area. In 1922, fossil scientist Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960) led a large expeditionary force, complete with camels and trucks, to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. At a site they named the Flaming Cliffs of Shabarakh Usu, the scientists found a Protoceratops skull. Thrilled with their discovery, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935), president of the American Museum of Natural History, ordered a return expedition to Central Asia. It was a new collector, George Olsen, who found the dinosaur eggs at Flaming Cliffs in 1923. OTHER NEW FINDS The expedition found several new species of dinosaurs, including Sa urornithoides, Velociraptor, and the curiously beaked Psittacosaurus. One skelet on was found on top of a nest of eggs, as if caught in the act of stealing. Henry Fairfield Osborn named it Oviraptor philoceratops, "the egg-stealer that loves horned dinosaurs." The expedition also discovered tiny mammal skulls from the Cretaceous Period (144-65 mya), which proved that mammals were alive at the same time as the dinosaurs. DINOMANIA The scientists returned to the United States to study their finds and to try to raise money for future expeditions. The discovery of dinosaur eggs had fired the public's imagination. When Roy Chapman Andrews gave his first lecture at the American Museum of Natural History, 4,000 people wanted the 1,400 seats available. Reporters dogged his every move and fought for exclusive rights to photograph the eggs. One egg was sold for $5,000 as a publicity stunt, and a total of $280,000 was raised for the next expedition. RETURN TO THE GOBI The 1925 expedition was the largest yet, with 40 men, many vehicles, and 125 camels. Then came a long gap before Russian, Polish, and Mongolian paleontologists also made major dinosaur finds in Mongolia. In the 1990s, a new team from the American Museum of Natural History worked with Mongolian scientists, finding an exciting fresh site and showing that "egg-stealer" Oviraptor had really sat on its own eggs, as birds do today.
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