National Geographic: Dinosaur Hunters Page #3

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in a bad nightmare.

It was an image our culture

nourished for generations.

Dinosaurs were fierce,

monstrous...

and not all that bright.

Many of the new ideas

about dinosaurs

are coming from the amazing

boneyard called Ukhaa Tolgod.

The team discovered the site

three years ago.

Now, to get to the dinosaurs,

all they have to do...

is find it again.

The maps in general are pretty

lousy for the Gobi Desert.

The towns on those maps

are myths in many cases.

We don't even pay

any attention to

any of the roads

marked on those maps.

They're completely wrong.

Even a satellite tracking

system doesn't always help.

So the satellite

may know where you are

but the road you need

may be in a

completely

different direction

so the roads here are

very confusing.

There are no signs and many

of them lead nowhere.

We're gonna go like this.

We're a little off course.

We're not really lost.

We're just a bit off course.

So we've gotta go

this-away and that-away.

At times, you have to go in

circles to move forward.

Roy Chapman Andrews too spent

more than a few days

wandering the Gobi.

But in the end,

he blundered into a discovery

that stunned the world.

A member of his expedition

literally stumbled across

a critical link in the great

chain of being.

On July 13,

George Olsen reported

that he had found

some fossil eggs.

We did not take

his story very seriously.

Nevertheless,

we were all curious enough

to go with him

to inspect his find.

There could be no mistake.

Our paleontologist

finally said,

"Gentlemen,

there is no doubt about it.

You are looking at the first

dinosaur egg ever found."

The discovery made Roy Chapman

Andrews a national hero.

But the eggs were not alone.

Lying above the nest

was a bizarre skeleton -

a bird-like dinosaur

unknown to man.

It had apparently been

caught in the act of murder -

stealing the eggs.

So it was forever cursed

with the name Oviraptor -

Latin for "egg thief."

It would be years

before we discovered

the strange truth

about the animal called

Oviraptor.

In the late '20s,

the winds of change

blew fiercely over

the great dinosaur

fields of Mongolia.

That's when

Roy Chapman Andrews

was forced to leave

the Gobi forever.

We are more than ever convinced

that Central Asia

was a paleontology

Garden of Eden.

Still, we have shown the way,

have broken trail as it were.

Later, others will reap

a rich harvest.

Decades later,

Mark and Mike are

hoping to find

the treasures that Andrews

left untouched in the sand.

After more than a week

in the blistering Gobi,

they finally reach their goal:

the brown hills of Ukhaa Tolgod

With all the delays,

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