In the 1920s, Roy Chapman Andrews and his field crews from the American Museum of Natural History in New York gained world-wide fame by discovering the first, well preserved dinosaur eggs and nests at the Flaming Cliffs in the remote Gobi Desert of Mongolia.
Since 1991, field crews from AMNH have picked up where Andrews left off by traveling across the globe every summer to work with colleagues from the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Like Andrews, our crews have discovered a treasure-trove of 72 million-year-old, Cretaceous fossils representing dinosaurs, lizards and our distant mammalian relatives at the Flaming Cliffs, as well as many other localities, including a site called Tugrugyin Shireh (pronounced: two'-grew-geen sure-eh'). These animals inhabited an ancient desert, situated in the center of the Asian continent, with extensive fields of sand dunes that were occasionally drenched by thunder storms.
The president of the InfoQuest Foundation, Lowell Dingus, served as the chief geologist on the Mongolian/American Museum expeditions in the 1990s.
During the first year of our expeditions, we discovered an important dinosaur skeleton at Tugrugyin Shireh. Once collected, the skeleton had to be reconstructed and identified by AMNH paleontologists. This sequence of two, interactive, digital modules simulate the scientific procedures that our scientists employed to do that. The first, called Anatomy Adventure, is designed to let students reconstruct the dinosaur skeleton and learn the basics of dinosaur anatomy. The second, called Identification Adventure, is designed to help students identify the skeleton that they reconstructed in the first module. InfoQuest hopes that these modules will become the foundation for a series of full-blown, virtual expeditions that will be built over the next several years, which will allow students to work with scientists on the expedition crews to solve geologic and paleontologic mysteries raised by the fossils that they discover in the field.
To find out more about the AMNH expeditions to Mongolia, please, feel free to visit the AMNH Ology website at http://ology.amnh.org/paleontology/gobi/index.html.
In addition, the story of collecting a dinosaur skeleton in Mongolia can be found in this children's book:
Dingus, L. and M. Norell. 1996. Searching for Velociraptor, Harper Collins, New York, 32 pp.
For information about the ancient environment of the Gobi and how the fossils were preserved, please also see the following popular article:
Dingus, L. and D. B. Loope. 2000. Death in the Dunes, Natural History, 109: 50-55.
Good luck, and we hope you and your students enjoy the adventures!
