The Gobi Desert is a great place to find fossils, but in 1993, an expedition there uncovered an unprecedented treasure-trove of dinosaur bones. The question remained – why were they finding so many skeletons in one place? I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
“By about three hours time, just working in a very, very small area, about the size of a baseball field, we had come up with maybe 40 or 50 dinosaur skeletons.”
Michael Novacek is Curator of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and leader of the Gobi expedition.
“The site may have served as sort of a collecting spot for animals, maybe some kind of oasis…The oasis scenario maybe addresses the question why are so many dinosaurs living there, but it doesn’t directly address the question why are there so many dinosaur skeletons, or fossils, preserved there. And that question we’ve investigated; I’ve got a couple of real sand experts on the team that have been doing this detective work. It’s clear that there were some catastrophic events at this oasis. That there were probably some mass deaths. And what caused those mass deaths? There may have been disease in these populations and so forth. But one of the distinctive aspects of the fossils is that they were rapidly buried in sand and mud. So our current idea is that maybe with these infrequent rainstorms, these animals were just basically covered up by mud flows or avalanches of wet sand.”
More on the Gobi Desert in future programs.
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Pulse of the Planet is presented by the American Museum of Natural History. Additional funding for this series has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.