I’m Dr. Cary Woodruff, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at Frost Science. Take a step into my office with this monthly blog series, and let’s dig deeper.
As soon as our fieldwork season in Montana was done, I raced back to Miami, had a minute or two to catch my breath, and then I was off again for a few weeks of fieldwork in Mongolia.
Mongolia? What were you doing in Mongolia?
Digging up dinosaurs!
There are dinosaurs in Mongolia?
YES!
During the 1920s, the American Museum of Natural History led a series of expeditions (called the Central Asiatic Expeditions) into Mongolia with the primary goal of finding fossil evidence of human origins. Instead, they found a literal treasure trove of fossil mammals and dinosaurs. In fact, the very first dinosaur eggs EVER discovered were found in 1923 at a place called the Flaming Cliffs (the Mongolian name is Bayanzag [pronounced bye-yin-zag]). And ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and Western scientific expeditions could return, Mongolia has been a world-renowned paleontological destination.
I was fortunate enough to work in Mongolia in 2023 with an expedition led by world-famous paleontologist Dr. Phil Currie—who has worked in Mongolia every single year for over 30 years! This past month, I participated in an expedition led by two very close colleagues and friends—Dr. Phil Bell and Dr. Nic Campione. Phil, Nic, and I have known each other since our student days (and Nic is my ‘academic brother ’; we did our PhDs with the same advisor). This year our primary objective was a Tarbosaurus (pronounced tar-bow-sore-us), which is an Asian cousin to our famous Tyrannosaurus. Nic had found this Tarbosaurus on the very last day of the season last year, so our job this season was to excavate it. And while Tarbosaurus was a big animal, the one we were digging wasn’t. It was a ‘baby.’ Literally. Its skull wasn’t much longer than a football, and most of the skeleton was there! It’ll take time to clean, examine, and study this fossil, but it will play an incredibly important role in understanding how these large predatory dinosaurs grew up.
A ‘baby’ Tarbosaurus wasn’t the only amazing experience of the trip. Fossil footprints, fossilized skin, giant fossil turtles, and more were among the many cool things we found. For me, one of the neatest things about this trip was the student experience. Phil and Nic are both professors at the University of New England in Australia, and most of the folks on the expedition were their university students. Through their university, Phil and Nic had arranged this trip to count towards the students degrees, and to see these students learning and getting these experiences first-hand in such an incredible place was inspiring. And even though the trip is over and we’re all back to normal, we’re already starting to talk about next year, and there’s a possibility that Frost Science will be able to participate and maybe even extend our Digging Expeditions program.