To eastern Mongolia under the guidance of Roy Chapman Andrews, leader of the Third Asiatic Expedition, which has now been in this field for three seasons, the writer made a rapid journey examining personally the fossil beds surrounding Iren Dabasu, at the lowest point of the eastern end of the Gobi Desert on the Urga trail. The three formations exposed here are:
Houldjun beds, Baluchitherium Zone, Upper Oligocene
Irdin Manha beds, Protitanotherium Zone, Upper Eocene
Iren Dabasu beds, Middle Cretaceous.
The Houldjin Formation is of historic interest as including the spot where the Russian explorer, Obruchev, found a single rhinoceros tooth, probably belonging to Baluchitherium; also because the first fossil by the Third Asiatic Expedition was found here. This eastern exposure of the Baluchitherium zone has very rich and fragmentary remains. The finest specimens of Baluchitherium came from the far western exposure of Hsanda Gol.
The Irdin Manha is extraordinarily rich in Titanotheres and other mammals of exactly the same geologic age as the Uinta C beds of Utah, at the very close of Eocene time. Superb collections were obtained from these beds in the type locality, also ninety-eight miles west at Ula Usa.
The Iren Dabasu ("valley of the salt lake") beds yielded rich littoral fauna, of iguanodonts, of dinosaurs, of carnivorous dinosaurs and of toothless herbivorous dinosaurs known as Ornithomimus or Struthiomimus, which will enable us to determine precisely the geologic age of these beds, probably lower levels of Upper Cretaceous.
The Third Asiatic party this season consisted of Leader Roy Chapman Andrews, Frederick E. Morris, geologist and topographer, and Walter Granger, vertebrate palaeontologist, with three field assistants, Messrs. Kaisen, Olsen and Johnson, all highly experienced in Montana and Wyoming exploration. This strong party returned to the locality in eastern Mongolia where a single small type specimen of Protoceratops andrewsi was discovered during the season of 1922 and assigned to the Lower Cretaceous. Here the most remarkable discoveries of the year were made, namely, dinosaur beds of unparalleled richness, probably of Lower Cretaceous age and of Aeolian origin. The dominant element in the fauna is Protoceratops, which is found in all stages of development from the young still contained within the egg before hatching to the fully adult. This proves to be a veritable ancestor of the Ceratopsia, with a well-developed neck frill, with rudiments of horns above the eye and also beneath the nasals. Seventy-two skulls and twelve more or less complete skeletons of this remarkable animal were unearthed and transported by camel caravan 800 miles across the desert to Kalgan, where they have recently arrived, as announced by cable. With Protoceratops were found many other kinds of reptiles, affinities of which have thus far not been determined.
To sum up the season 1923, out of the thirteen fossil-bearing horizons discovered in 1922, seven were extensively explored; five of these yielded very rich fossil results, which in time will enable us to determine precisely their geologic age. Mongolia is proved to have been highly fertile, a richly inhabited country from the close of Tertiary time, an evolution center ¨C possibly the chief evolution center of land reptiles during the Age of Reptiles and a very important evolution center of the land mammals during the Age of Mammals.
-- Bibliographical information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan. 15, 1924), 23-24.
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Ghengis Khan
Prejevalsky's Exploration in Mongolia
Foreign retirees in Manchuria
Central Asia after the battle at Penjdeh
Japanese priest crosses desert to Tibet
Was Prejevalsky the father of Stalin?
My first trip to Tibet
First Japanese Buddhist Temple in America
Mongolia A Culture Under Threat
Funds to Improve Mongolian Prison Conditions
Degrading Conditions at Inner Mongolia’s Prison
An American in Turkistan
