Expedition on the Horizon…

The Gobi Desert - and paleontology - was hurtled to international fame in the 1920s by legendary explorer Roy Chapman Andrews. Andrew’s ambitious 1922 Central Asiatic Expedition, which originally set off in search of human origins, unearthed landmark “firsts” for paleontology - including the first evidence of dinosaur eggs andnests. Chapman’s discoveries revealed a dinosaurian world that fascinated the public.

In the decades that followed World War II, political conflicts kept Americans out of Mongolia. In the interim, Russian and Polish expedition teams collaborated with Mongolian scientists to unearth an amazing diversity of dinosaurs and early mammals - Velociraptor, Oviraptor, Protoceratops, and ornithomimids (the “ostrich mimic”) - to name just a few.

Most people are surprised to learn that 2/3 of the Gobi Desert lies in China's Inner Mongolia, not in Outer Mongolia where Andrews and most subsequent teams have worked. 

Despite nearly a century of dinosaur exploration in Outer Mongolia, Inner Mongolia holds the world’s greatest expanse of unexplored fossil-rich desert. The vast stretch of Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia is the world’s Cretaceous frontier… and the rocks here tell the story of the last chapter of dinosaur evolution on Asia.

The 2001 Inner Mongolia Expedition represents a first for Chicago - the first Chicago-led paleontological expedition to the Gobi, and the first time Paul Sereno has led an expedition team to Asia.

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