In Pursuit of Early Mammals

1 Introduction

1.0. Geological time scale of the Mesozoic.

Modified from Palmer and Geissman (1999).

THE EVOLUTION OF MAMMALS DURING THE AGE OF DINOSAURS (IN the Mesozoic era; see figure 1.0), which encompasses 160 million years (Ma), or more than two-thirds of all mammalian history, was for a long time poorly known, with intriguing mysteries surrounding their origins and the relations among the different groups. Among the first to sort through this history was George Gaylord Simpson. In his first monograph on Mesozoic mammals (Simpson 1928a), he re-described most of the British Mesozoic mammals that had been collected since the middle of the nineteenth century and that are housed in the British Museum (Natural History) in London (now the Natural History Museum). His book also contained descriptions of some cynodonts (tritylodontids), which were at the time regarded as mammals. A year later, he published a second large monograph devoted to the Mesozoic mammals of North America (Simpson 1929). It was valuable work, but new discoveries were already beginning to alter our view of early mammals.

Simpson’s work contained no account of the significant material being uncovered in the deserts of Mongolia by the American Museum of Natural History’s Central Asiatic Expeditions (see chapter 3). Between 1922 and 1930, five expeditions to Mongolia brought back numerous dinosaur and mammal skeletons, as well as the first Cretaceous mammal skulls ever found. In addition to hundreds of articles and books on the scientific results of the paleontological expeditions to Mongolia, a number of popular or semi-popular books and articles were published in various languages, beginning with the great work of Roy Chapman Andrews, The New Conquest of Central Asia (1932).

In 1930, and again after the Second World War, the Mongolian People’s Republic was closed to Western scientists, but paleontologists from Poland (a member of the Eastern Bloc) were allowed to work there. In 1963, I organized for the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences the first Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expedition to Mongolia. From 1963 until 1971 a total of eight expeditions were at work in Mongolia (see chapter 4). When the collections assembled by the first few expeditions arrived in Warsaw and were in large part prepared, the institute decided to show some of the prepared specimens to the public, and in 1968 opened the first exhibition in the Palace of Culture in Warsaw under the title Dinosaurs from the Gobi Desert (figure 1.1). Then in the summer of 1975 a permanent dinosaur exhibit opened in the Park of Culture in Chorzów (an industrial center in Silesia; figure 1.2). Subsequently, our institute opened in 1978 a permanent exhibit in the Palace of Culture in Warsaw entitled Evolution on Land.

1.1. A. Part of the exhibition Dinosaurs from the Gobi Desert, which opened in Warsaw in spring of 1968. On the right, the skeleton of a young individual of Tarbosaurus bataar, seen from the front, mounted in a semi-erect position; on the left, high on the wall, a cast of the shoulder girdle and forelimbs of a gigantic ornithomimosaur Deinocheirus mirificus. B. Roman Kozłowski (1889–1977) on the right, with Mongolian Ambassador Mr. Gurazhavyn Tuwaan, during the opening of the same exhibition in Warsaw.

Archive of the Institute of Paleobiology, Warsaw.

1.2. A. The first Dinosaur Park, open in Poland, at Chorzów in Silesia (southwestern Poland) in 1975. The models of dinosaurs were made at the Institute of Paleobiology in Warsaw, at the scale 1:10 by Wojciech Skarżyński and then enlarged to natural size by professional sculptors, on the spot. B. Reconstruction of a running Gallimimus bullatus in Chorzów Park.

Archive of the Institute of Paleobiology, Warsaw. Photographs by W. Skarżyński.

The Polish-Mongolian expeditions were of great importance for my work on the Late Cretaceous mammalian fauna, and I established many contacts with other workers in the field. One of these contacts proved to be particularly fortuitous. Beginning in 1965, I was in touch with Jason Lillegraven (figure 1.3A), who was working on his dissertation on the mammal fauna from the upper part of the Edmonton Formation in Canada (now referred to as the Scollard Formation). Since I had been working on Late Cretaceous mammalian faunas from Mongolia, we closely cooperated at that time. In a letter dated 1 March 1976, Jay announced that he and Bill Clemens thought the time was ripe for a new book on Mesozoic mammals and asked whether I would be interested in contributing a chapter on Asiatic Mesozoic mammals. I agreed with enthusiasm! During the next months our correspondence concerned mostly the details of the book and its chapters. I then accepted an invitation from the University of Wyoming to visit for six weeks in November and the beginning of December 1976 to work on editing our book. I spent the summer of 1976 in Poland in the cottage my husband and I shared in the small village of Zdziarka on the Vistula River some 60 km northwest of Warsaw hammering out on a typewriter (there were no personal computers at that time!) the chapters assigned to me.

1.3. A. Jason A. Lillegraven as a student in 1964. B. Richard L. Cifelli. C. Zhe-Xi Luo.

During the autumn of 1976, typescript in hand, I arrived in Laramie, Wyoming, where Lillegraven had just settled into a new, large family house with his first wife, Bernie, and two small, charming children, Brita and Turi. And we began our work. In the preface to the book (Lillegraven et al. 1979), we described our rationale for the project: The idea of this book developed through a course on the subject of Mesozoic mammals offered in the spring of 1976 in the Department of Geology of the University of Wyoming. Recognition by the students of: (1) the scattered nature of the literature; (2) the lack of recent general reviews; and (3) the fact that knowledge on Mesozoic mammals is expanding rapidly, led to the conclusion that it was opportune to provide a summary of the ‘state of art’ as of the late 1970’s.

From correspondence with Jay, I had been led to understand that some of his students would provide descriptions of some groups of Mesozoic mammals. However, not much had been accomplished when I arrived in Laramie. It was evident that writing such summaries had been just too difficult for some students, and these chapters were not going to be written without contributions from paleontologists currently studying Mesozoic mammals. So we invited our Harvard colleagues Alfred W. Crompton and Farish A. Jenkins–specialists on early mammals–to write chapters on the Origin of Mammals and on the Triconodonta. In addition, William A. Clemens, one of the book’s editors, discussed with me the chapter on Multituberculata, which we decided to write together. He also agreed to correct the chapter on Symmetrodonta and become a co-author along with Michael L. Cassiliano, who originally had written this chapter (Cassiliano and Clemens 1979).

By the time I was ready to leave Laramie in December 1976, we had a more or less clear picture of how the book should be subdivided into chapters, whom we should contact as potential authors, and what more should be done. It was evident that we would need to meet at least once more. I invited Jay and Bill to Poland, and they arrived in Warsaw in the early spring of 1977. We packed all the literature we had on Mesozoic mammals and left for the cottage at Zdziarka to work for three solid weeks on our book. Beginning in 1977 Jay Lillegraven worked hard on the final editing of the book, Mesozoic Mammals: The First Two-Thirds of Mammalian History, which appeared in 1979.

In June 1981, the eminent Italian paleontologist Eugenia Montanaro Gallitelli (1906–1997), a specialist on fossil corals and micropaleontology, invited numerous invertebrate and vertebrate paleontologists from around the world to an international paleontological meeting in Venice, at which they presented papers on crucial problems of paleontology. I provided a lecture on Marsupial-Placental Dichotomy and Paleogeography of Cretaceous Theria, which, together with other lectures read at the symposium, was subsequently published in the book edited by Montanaro Gallitelli (1982).

In 1982 my husband Zbigniew Jaworowski, at that time professor of radiobiology at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, received an invitation from the Centre d’Etudes Nucléaires in Fontenay-aux-Roses near Paris to come for a year to study the history of the contamination of the French population with heavy metals and radioactive elements. I took a one-year leave from the Institute of Paleobiology and joined him. Our stay in Paris was prolonged until August 1984 (see chapter 10 for a description of my work during our stay in Paris).

In the summer of 1985 I chanced to read in Nature an announcement from the University of Oslo calling for applications for the position of professor of paleontology. The situation of Polish science was at that time very difficult–there was no money for equipment and no funding for scientific literature or for traveling abroad. After a short discussion with my husband we decided that I should apply. In September, I sent my application with five boxes containing all of my publications, copies of my diplomas, and other necessary documents. The University of Oslo (figure 1.4) appointed a five-member international committee to assess ten candidates who applied from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, and Poland. The committee completed its work in December 1986 and informed me that I won the competition. The nomination, in distinguished and beautiful regal style, signed by King Olav VI himself, was sent to me in January 1987. I was expected to take my position at the university by 1 June 1987.

My husband and I spent eight years and four months (1987–1995) in Norway (figure 1.4), where I received several grants from the Norwegian Science Foundation, which enabled my cooperation with colleagues from abroad, in particular with Russian paleontologists–the late Lev A. Nessov (1947–1995) and the Armenian Russian zoologist Petr P. Gambaryan (working in the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg).

1.4. A. The building of the Mineralogical-Geological and Paleontological Museum in the Botanical Garden in Oslo. B. The cast of Tyrannosaurus rex mounted in a horizontal position of the lumbar and thoracic vertebrae. C–E. Part of the staff of the Museum. C. Jørn H. Hurum. D. Hans-Arne Nakrem. E. Standing from left, Natascha Heintz, Kjell Bjørklund, and David Bruton; sitting, Bogdan Bocianowski.

A and B. Courtesy of Per Aas, Paleontologisk Museum, Oslo; E. Courtesy of Zbigniew Jaworowski.

During this time, the riches of the Gobi Desert were opened to scientists from the West when the political situation in European and Asiatic countries changed, beginning in 1989 with the Solidarity movement in Poland. The new political openness also resulted in invitations being extended to Mongolian paleontologists to exhibit Mongolian dinosaurs in the West.

As a consequence of one of these invitations, an exhibit entitled Dinosaurs et Mammifères du Désert de Gobi was set to open in Paris in 1992 (Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle 1992). My friend Philippe Taquet, at that time director of the Paleontological Institute of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, decided that the dinosaur displays would be more interesting if the dinosaurs were shown in association with the mammals that lived at that time. Two eminent French specialists on early mammals from the institute in Paris, Denise Sigogneau-Russell and her husband Donald Russell, visited me in Oslo at the beginning of February 1992. It was during that visit that Don, also a world-renowned specialist in preparing casts of minute fossils, produced copies of the Late Cretaceous mammals collected by members of the Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expeditions. These casts were subsequently displayed alongside the dinosaur skeletons at the Paris exhibition. For the book released in connection with the exhibit, written by the staff of the museum in Paris in cooperation with Mongolian paleontologists based in Ulaanbaatar, Philippe Taquet contributed the section on dinosaurs (Taquet 1992), while Denise Sigogneau-Russell (1992) described the Mesozoic mammals.

A cooperative endeavor between the Mongolian Academy and the American Museum of Natural History led by American paleontologist Michael Novacek, a specialist on the evolution of eutherian mammals, and the late Demberlyin Dashzeveg, from Mongolia, began its work in 1990. In addition to numerous papers on the scientific results of the expeditions, Novacek published a charming popular book, Dinosaurs from the Flaming Cliffs (1996), describing the work of the expeditions.

In 1995, just before my husband and I were to leave Norway and return to Poland, David M. Unwin contacted me on behalf of the editors (M. J. Benton, M. A. Shishkin, D. M. Unwin, and E. N. Kurochkin) of the book The Age of Dinosaurs in Russia and Mongolia and proposed that I contribute a chapter on Mammals from the Mesozoic of Mongolia. I accepted but suggested that three other scientists, who in the last few years had contributed to the knowledge of Mesozoic mammals from Mongolia, join me as co-authors–M. J. Novacek, B. A. Trofimov, and D. Dashzeveg. My proposal was accepted, and I submitted our chapter in 1997. In 2000 the book was published by Cambridge University Press (Kielan-Jaworowska et al. 2000).

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a remarkable accumulation of knowledge about early mammals. Mesozoic mammals have been discovered on all the continents (except Antarctica) and in regions where they had been unknown previously, for example, Australia and Madagascar. These discoveries include excellently preserved teeth, jaws, and parts of skeletons belonging to the groups that were formerly poorly known or unknown. In 1998, Richard L. Cifelli (figure 1.3B), from the University of Oklahoma, and I decided to write a new book on Mesozoic mammals. However, as both of us had been working mostly on Cretaceous mammals, it soon became evident that we needed a specialist on the earliest mammals and mammalian origins. We invited our colleague and friend Zhe-Xi Luo to join us.

Cifelli and Luo are both eminent specialists on Mesozoic mammals. Rich Cifelli, born in 1954 in Centralia (Washington, United States) is the son of Richard Cifelli, a micropaleontologist. He received his Ph.D. in vertebrate paleontology in 1983 at Columbia University under Malcolm C. McKenna. In 1986 he came to the University of Oklahoma as a professor of zoology and as the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History. His main scientific interests concern early mammals and their origins, relationships, and paleoecology. Being a hard worker and a talented writer, and owing to his ability to synthesize information, his deep knowledge, and impressive field experience, he is one of the leading authorities on Mesozoic mammals in the United States.

Zhe-Xi Luo (figure 1.3C), born in 1958 in Beijing, was one of the first Chinese students allowed to study abroad as a consequence of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. He arrived in the United States in 1982 as a 24-year-old student of paleontology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and his postdoctoral training at Harvard. In 1986 he joined the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, where he was curator of vertebrate paleontology and associate director of the museum. In 2011 he became professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Chicago. I met him in 1983 when I visited William Clemens, who had supervised Luo’s doctoral dissertation, at Berkeley. Like me, Luo studied the mammals of the Mesozoic era, and our paths often crossed. According to international agreement, Chinese students were supposed to return to their homeland after completing their studies. However, in April 1990, several months after the Tiananmen massacre, the U.S. government, with approval of President George Bush, decided that about 80,000 Chinese students could stay in the United States. Luo and his wife, a doctor of chemistry, were in this group. Now Luo often visits China and cooperates with Chinese colleagues on descriptions of new Mesozoic mammals found there.

In 2004, after five years of intensive cooperation, during which my co-authors (figures 1.3B and C) came to Konstancin, Poland, once or twice a year to work with me, the comprehensive volume Mammals from the Age of Dinosaurs was published by Columbia University Press (Kielan-Jaworowska, Cifelli, and Luo 2004). The early mammals have also been treated in three more recent books: The Origin and Evolution of Mammals by Tom S. Kemp (2005), The Rise of Placental Mammals, edited by Kenneth D. Rose and J. David Archibald (2005), and The Beginning of the Age of Mammals by Kenneth D. Rose (2006). In 2010 José F. Bonaparte and Laura A. Migale published a book (in Spanish) on the Mesozoic mammals of South America.

In addition to hundreds of articles and books on the scientific results of the paleontological expeditions to Mongolia, a number of popular or semi-popular books and articles have been also published in various languages. Soviet expeditions to Mongolia working in 1946, 1948, and 1949 were reported in two articles written by their leader Ivan Efremov (1949, 1954, both in Russian) and in the book by Anatolii Rozhdestvenskii (1969), published in Russian and also translated into Japanese (see also chapter 3). I wrote two popular books, describing the Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expeditions (published in Polish in 1969 and 1972 but not cited here). The first of these books was translated into English (as Hunting for Dinosaurs) and published in 1969 by MIT Press (Kielan-Jaworowska 1969b).

An interesting book describing the work of paleontologists in the Gobi Desert was published in 1993 in New Zealand by J. R. Lavas, who never has been in Mongolia. He graduated in zoology from the University of Auckland and is an illustrator as well as a zoologist. While writing the book, he contacted paleontologists and members of the Gobi expeditions in various countries and managed to collect an enormous number of photographs, notes, and information. His book describes very competently the stories of the paleontological work in the Gobi Desert, which brings me to the present volume.

In the pages that follow, I review the current state of our knowledge about Mesozoic mammals, their origins, anatomy, systematics, paleobiology, and distribution, based mostly on my personal experience. I recount the difficulties and pleasures encountered in seeking out these rare fossils and the effort involved in organizing fieldwork (including major expeditions), using new methods, and removing the fossils from the rock once they have been discovered. The book also explores the special techniques employed to obtain as much information as possible about the fossils, the changing views on the origin and relationships among early mammals, the discoveries and reassessments that result from paleontologists’ endless discussions with colleagues, and a range of related issues. In the first place, I describe my own experiences and those of my close friends, whose work I was able to observe directly. There are, however, groups of early mammals that I know mostly from the literature or from contacts with specialists who work on them. In such cases I discuss these groups based on the information I have gathered on the history of research on those mammals and the persons involved in the relevant studies. As my working experience has focused largely on my own studies of Cretaceous mammals from Mongolia, I recapitulate in chapter 4 my fieldwork during the Polish-Mongolian Paleontological Expeditions to the Gobi Desert.

2 Methods: Collecting Materials and Establishing Relationships

2.1. A, B. Fieldwork in Hell Creek, Wyoming, organized by Malcolm C. McKenna in the summer of 1983. A. Soft sediment was placed in wooden crates with bottoms made of metal netting. Members of the crew moved the crates in water and then placed the crates for drying the residue on the surrounding hills. B. In the foreground, Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, carrying two boxes with residue to be placed on the hill for drying. C. Malcolm C. McKenna (1930–2008) in his study at the Natural History Museum in New York in 1998.

All figures courtesy of Priscilla McKenna.

UNTIL ABOUT THE MIDDLE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, PALEONtologists thought that Mesozoic mammals were small, rare, and poorly differentiated creatures represented by primitive groups. Intensification of search for Mesozoic mammals all around the world, however, changed this opinion. The great impact on this increase of specimens and studies on fossil vertebrates in the second half of the twentieth century was related to development of new methods and organization of expeditions to areas not exploited or hardly exploited earlier.

In 1928, the American paleontologist Claude W. Hibbard (1905–1973) started to collect small vertebrate fossils by screen washing and drying soft sediments (Hibbard 1949). Hibbard’s method was then developed for Mesozoic mammals by McKenna (1962, 1965), McKenna et al. (1994), and Clemens (1965). Their screening techniques were further improved by Jason A. Lillegraven, who in the early 1960s collected small vertebrate fossils from the Late Cretaceous upper Edmonton Formation (now known as the Scollard Formation) at outcrops along the Red Deer River in Alberta, Canada. Jay Lillegraven described his method in his Ph.D. thesis, published in 1969. For washing the soft sediments yielding small vertebrates, Jay used the Red Deer River’s current, with a fluctuating water level. He and Tom Rich (at that time a graduate student) constructed several floating rafts, which they aligned perpendicular to the river current. Each raft had an empty bottom divided by smaller boards into 24 compartments; Lillegraven placed into each compartment two washing boxes, with bases made of bronze netting. He used two types of washing boxes: one coarse-screened with openings of 1.5–2 mm in diameter, and a second type with openings with diameters 0.6 mm. After one night of washing using the three rafts agitated by the river current, a super-concentrate was collected, dried, and transported to the laboratory (Lillegraven 1969: figures 3 and 4). Lillegraven was lucky in having access to the current of the Red Deer River. More often, in the field there is only a small pond (reservoir) or stream that is available for washing sediment.

By 1983 the technique had become quite sophisticated, as I discovered that summer when at the invitation of Malcolm C. McKenna I joined him and his crew at Lance Creek in Wyoming where they were collecting mammals from outcrops of Late Cretaceous age in the Lance Formation. Malcolm brought 300 boxes with a base made of metal and a bulldozer to excavate sediment. He transported the sediments to a reservoir, where the ten of us in his crew stood in water up to our knees and washed the sediment by shaking the boxes in pond water (figure 2.1A, B). The washed sediment, still in boxes, was left to dry in the sun, and a new cycle of washing with new boxes started.

The crew washed about one metric ton of sediment a day. Malcolm was a man of great enterprise, who contributed enormously to the improvement of the screen-washing method introduced by Hibbard. At the beginning, he visited Claude Hibbard in the field and discussed methods with him. While Hibbard used 12 washing boxes during typical fieldwork, McKenna increased this number to 300, which allowed him to collect fossils at a much greater rate. In 1983 at Lance Creek, several long tables covered with canvas were set up on the hills, near the washing boxes, and the dry concentrated sediment was dumped on these tables in very thin layers. Crew members sat around the tables and, sometimes using hand lenses, hand picked through the concentrated sediment, putting the small vertebrate fossils they picked out into plastic boxes.

By using such water-screening techniques in the United States and Canada, and later on in Europe, Asia, and South America, the number of Mesozoic mammals in paleontological collections of museums around the world increased several-fold, helping to advance our understanding of the structure and evolution of these previously rarely found animals.

An important new methodology for determining how species are phylogenetically related was introduced in the twentieth century by the German entomologist Willy Hennig (1913–1976). Beginning in 1950, Hennig put forward the idea of phylogenetic analysis, known also as cladistic analysis. Hennig first published in German, and his new method was little known outside Germany until the 1966 publication of his book Phylogenetic Systematics in the United States. The main difference between Hennig’s cladistic method and the traditional phylogenetic method is that traditional phylogenetics is based on all anatomical knowledge without necessarily giving some morphological characters more importance than others. Hennig’s phylogenetic analysis is based on the recognition that only derived characters can be used to work out relationships.

With the advent of the computer era, cladistics flourished enormously as specialized programs enabled rapid analyses of vast numbers of characters. This resulted in a cornucopia of equally parsimonious trees, which mercifully leaves some room for further exploration by the human mind in figuring out how taxa are related.

The third phylogenetic method, introduced by Sokal and Sneath (1963), called numerical taxonomy, or phenetics, has also been used. It differs from cladistic systematics in that all characters used for analysis have the same value.

In contrast to Sokal and Sneath, Hennig recognized two types of characters:

1) Plesiomorphic characters, which occur in the primitive members of the studied group, and which should not be used in cladistic studies.

2) Apomorphic (or derived) characters, which made their appearance in the studied group and occur in all its members. According to Hennig, phylogenetic analysis should be based on apomorphic characters.

Cladistic analysis with respect to early mammals was used for the first time by Timothy Rowe in his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by Kevin Padian. Rowe subsequently published the main ideas of his thesis in 1988 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Rowe (1988: 241) defined Mammalia as a taxon originating with the most recent common ancestor of the extant Monotremata and Theria. To diagnose Mammalia as so defined, 176 characters in the skull and postcranial skeleton, distributed among Placentalia, Marsupialia, Multituberculata, Monotremata, Morganucodontidae, Tritylodontidae, and Exaeretodon, were designated as primitive (plesiomorphic) or advanced (apomorphic) and analyzed by Swofford’s (2000) PAUP program.

Rowe subsequently published another paper on a similar subject, which he presented at a conference on mammals in New York organized by F. S. Szalay, M. J. Novacek, and M. C. McKenna at the end of May 1990 (and which was published in 1993). In addition to the paper by Rowe, there are several articles on the systematics of particular groups of Mesozoic mammals, published in the same volume, some of which I discuss in chapters related to the relevant groups.

Malcolm C. McKenna–Mammalian Paleontologist (1930–2008)

After the death of Malcolm C. McKenna in 2008, I corresponded with his wife and my friend, Priscilla. She provided this biographical sketch of her husband and his fascination with Mongolia.

Malcolm McKenna (figure 2.1C) grew up in Claremont, California, at that time a community surrounded by orange groves in the eastern part of the Los Angeles Basin. It was a small town whose distinction was that it contained Pomona, Scripps, and Claremont Men’s Colleges and the Webb School for Boys.

At the age of 13, Malcolm was enrolled in the Webb School, where he came under the influence of Raymond Alf, a dramatic and charismatic teacher of life sciences. During weekends and school vacations Ray took the boys on fossil collecting trips–to the Mojave Desert of California, the big Badlands of South Dakota, the famous fossil localities along the Niobrara River in Nebraska, the Green River Basin of Wyoming, and especially to Arizona and the Grand Canyon. The fossils collected on those trips are now in the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology at the Webb School.

During his lifetime, Malcolm made 13 or 14 hikes down various trails into the Grand Canyon and also four boat trips through the canyon of Colorado River. There is no way that a person like Malcolm could have had that kind of intimate contact with the Grand Canyon and its surroundings and not develop a deep fascination with understanding the forces that created the earth’s crust.

The home where Malcolm lived was at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, the steepest and most active mountain range in the continental United States. As he grew up, he spent his spare time wandering the foothills and mountains behind his home, where he studied rocks and life forms and collected all kinds of creatures. He was an indefatigable hiker, a characteristic well remembered by his graduate students, who often had to run to keep up with him!

In his early teens, his love of exploration was captured by the real-life stories of the Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History under the leadership of Roy Chapman Andrews and Walter Granger. He began to read everything he could find on the history and geology of Central Asia and conceived a strong ambition to travel there to study and collect. He made a significant collection of pertinent publications and became expert on the subject. Little did he know then that, one day, he would become curator of the fossil mammals collected in the Gobi by