When I was in second grade, I had a "boyfriend" who was
totally into dinosaurs. He lived, breathed, ate, and dreamed
dinosaurs. Me- I was into books and stuffed animals. I couldn't
understand why anyone would want to spend time looking at
lizard-like, freaky-looking creatures, like dinosaurs, all day long.
And then, about twenty years later, I saw part of a documentary about
dinosaurs and fossil-hunting and something clicked. Some years before
that, I had become interested in the history and politics of museums
and their collections, and learning about the acquisition of dinosaur
bones and eggs by natural history museums suddenly seemed
fascinating.
Thus my interest in this book about what some have called the
"Indiana Jones" of fossil exploration. Roy Chapman Andrews,
a charismatic, bold, restless, adventurous kind of guy, organized the
massive undertaking known as the Central Asiatic Expeditions from
1922 until 1930 in the Gobi Desert of Inner and Outer Mongolia. With
the help of his mentor at the American Museum of Natural History in
New York and financed by economic powerhouses like Morgan,
Rockefeller, and many others, Andrews was able to gather together a
talented group of scientists, archaeologists, and translators to
explore one of the last mysterious regions on Earth.
Many
people in the early 20th century thought that the Gobi held nothing
but sand and bandits, but as Andrews and his teams discovered over
nearly a decade of exploration, the great desert was unbelievably
rich in dinosaur and mammalian fossils and eggs. Such discoveries
helped fuel Andrews' multiple forays into the desert, as well as his
determination to bring back to America as many fossils as he could to
put on display in the museum.
Blocking him at every turn, though, were the bureaucratic hurdles put
up by the Chinese government and the political unrest of the region
in general. In these interwar years, China was nearly torn apart by
rival warlords in a power vacuum. The chaos they churned up added to
the disorganized methods of the bureaucratic machine, and the
Communist takeover of Mongolia, together with the roaming bandits,
made Andrews and his team prime targets. Foreigners weren't welcome,
especially those who came to remove artefacts from the Gobi's sand.
And yet, as Gallenkamp strenuously emphasizes, Andrews was always
careful to secure the correct permits for entering the Gobi. Often,
permits were changed without notice when the government was shaken
up, and Andrews would have to negotiate, with the help of his team,
new permits and contracts. He agreed to give Mongolia duplicates of
all that they discovered, but often this wasn't enough to appease
government officials.
Nonetheless,
Andrews and his team made some of the 20th century's greatest
discoveries about dinosaurs and various extinct mammals, though they
didn't find evidence of early humans, which they were also hoping to
discover in the deserts of Asia. Andrews's expeditions added fuel to
ongoing debates about evolution and human origins, and also raised
important questions (still debated today) about national "ownership"
of artefacts. So if you're interested in paleontology, exploration,
museums, or just fascinating history, check out Dragon
Hunter.
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