Dinosaurs in the Attic (17 page)

The background paintings and lighting required consummate skill. To achieve the illusion of space, the backgrounds were painted on a double curved surface. Such a surface invariably created complex problems in perspective for the painter. In addition, the backgrounds and foregrounds had to merge so seamlessly that the viewer would find it difficult to tell just where the painted background began.

Most delicate of all was the task of duplicating the marvelous
light
of Africa. Each diorama was different. One depicted the broad grasslands at high noon; another, a deep jungle dripping with rain; a third, the harsh desert at sunset. Not only did the lighting have to capture these settings, but it also had to be consistent with the artists' shading on the background paintings. Under no circumstances could the lighting throw a shadow
against
the background. Museum lighting specialists experimented with each group before achieving the correct balance.

The Akeley Hall of African Mammals remains today one of the most remarkable halls in any museum in the world, displaying a level of realism not achieved before or since. In the center of the hall, Akeley's massive elephant group stands out on an elevated platform. The elephants are depicted in a state of alarm: the old bull faces the entrance, ears extended, trunk testing the air; a younger bull has wheeled around to guard the rear of the herd. All around the elephants, embedded in walls of black polished marble, are Akeley's habitat groups. They stand out in the darkened hall in a blaze of internal sunlight, as if one were looking through bright windows into another world at another time—the Africa that Carl Akeley wanted so desperately to save.

EIGHT

Fossils in Outer Mongolia

When Henry Fairfield Osborn succeeded Morris K. Jesup as Museum President in 1908, he became the first (and up to now last) scientist to hold that post. Osborn firmly moved the Museum in the direction of exploration and research, especially in the area of vertebrate paleontology—Osborn's specialty. Most of this exploration, as we have seen, took place in the American West, but this was more a result of the richness of those fossil beds than any kind of American chauvinism. On the contrary, Osborn took a global view of his science. In particular, he had developed an evolutionary theory involving a very different part of the world: Central Asia.

Around the turn of the century, Osborn published a prediction that Central Asia—Mongolia—would turn out to be the evolutionary "staging ground" in which both the dinosaurian and mammalian life of the planet had evolved and dispersed. He based his theory on the observation that related dinosaurs and mammals had been found in such divergent areas as New Jersey, the Western states, England, and Western Europe. If the animals had migrated across the Bering Strait,
^*19
then one could think of the animals of New Jersey as occupying one extreme endpoint of dispersal and the animals of England as occupying the other. What land area occupied the midpoint—and therefore perhaps the dispersal point—of these extremes? Central Asia.

Osborn built his entire theory around, as he termed it, "this very interesting observation." Central Asia, he predicted, would turn out to be the birthplace of much of the fauna of the Northern Hemisphere. Most important, he believed that Central Asia would yield the earliest fossils of man—the so-called Missing Link.

Early in 1920, a young mammalogist at the Museum named Roy Chapman Andrews invited Osborn to lunch. After a pleasant repast (as Andrews reported later in his book,
Ends of the Earth),
President Osborn leaned back in his chair, lit his pipe, and said, "Well, Roy, what is on your mind?"

Andrews began to talk about his plan for a new expedition, a plan that he had been formulating for eight years. "We should try to reconstruct the whole past history of the Central Asian plateau," he said. "We ought to learn about its geological structure, fossil life, its past climate and vegetation. We should make collections of its living mammals, birds, fish and reptiles. We should map the unexplored and little-known Gobi Desert."

In short, Andrews not only wanted to confirm Osborn's own theory, he had even grander plans. With an unprecedented expedition, he wanted to make a complete scientific survey of this vast area. He proposed to lead a veritable army of scientific experts—from cartographers to paleontologists—to the heart of the unknown regions of Mongolia. As transportation, Andrews proposed a fleet of Dodge automobiles, which he felt could negotiate the level, gravelly sands of Mongolia better than anything else. A caravan of 125 camels, loaded with tons of gasoline and provisions, would resupply the expedition every six or seven hundred miles. The expedition and its dozens of scientists and assistants would spend a minimum of five years in the field, using Peking as a base during the winter months.

After several minutes, Osborn's unheeded pipe had gone out and he was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes glowing. When Andrews was finished, Osborn began asking questions. Finally he looked hard at Andrews and said, "Roy, we've got to do it."

It was a bold idea. Nothing remotely like it had ever been attempted. Mongolia was a huge and nearly uninhabited area two thousand miles long by one thousand miles wide. It was split into two regions: the gentle hills and fertile plains of Inner Mongolia, controlled by China, and the parched wasteland of Outer Mongolia, which had been alternately controlled by China and Russia. The vast Gobi Desert lay across the entire central portion of Outer Mongolia, a formidable natural barrier to exploration. Politically, the area was notoriously unstable. Russia was just recovering from its revolution, and China was in the throes of an endless series of civil wars. Outer Mongolia, which was undergoing and consolidating its own revolution, existed in a state of anarchy, overrun by rifle-toting brigands.

As if political problems weren't enough, the Central Asiatic Expedition (also called by Andrews the Third Asiatic Expedition) would face some of the most extreme weather conditions on the planet. During the winter, the temperature in Outer Mongolia plummets to forty or fifty degrees below zero. Violent winds pile even a light snowfall into heavy, impassable drifts, and the snow usually doesn't clear up until June. Then, in July and August, daytime temperatures soar to 110 degrees in the shade, while nights remain cold. All year, sudden windstorms sweep down from the Arctic and Siberian steppes and scour the landscape.

Any expedition would have to cope with these dangers. But the greatest danger of all was that the expedition would be a failure. Only one fossil—a rhinoceros tooth—had ever been found in Central Asia. Although Mongolia had been crudely mapped and had been visited by Westerners, virtually nothing was known about it scientifically. Osborn knew his theory was speculative, based mostly on the distribution of fossil fauna in
other
parts of the world. Several conservative scientists dismissed the idea, and one said that the Museum might as well look for fossils in the Pacific Ocean as to expect to find them in the wastes of Outer Mongolia. Some geologists scoffed at the idea that anyone could determine the geology of an area known to be covered mostly with shifting sand.

Nevertheless, Osborn enthusiastically endorsed Andrews' plan. While it may seem in hindsight to have been a risky gamble, Osborn had a deep belief in himself and his scientific abilities. While the possibility of failure (especially after the recent Crocker Land Expedition) must have occurred to him, he dismissed it. Although Osborn realized he was putting his own reputation and, to a lesser extent, the Museum's on the line with such a highly visible expedition, he did it unhesitatingly, without looking back. This was a chance to associate the Museum with a grand project and possibly an unprecedented discovery, something that would be remembered in the annals of science.

Andrews began raising funds. He had no trouble obtaining the quarter of a million dollars required for the first leg of the expedition. Wealthy New Yorkers eagerly subscribed funds for the project, and Andrews found himself courted by society in an exhausting round of dinner parties, balls, and society teas. A short office visit to J. P. Morgan netted $50,000, and other large donations followed. Once the money had been raised, the Museum formally announced the expedition.

Newspapers across the country published the story on their front pages. What especially caught popular attention was the search for the Missing Link. During the next weeks, literally thousands of telegrams and letters poured into Andrews' office at the Museum, most seeking a job with the expedition. He got offers of assistance from every imaginable quarter, including letters from clairvoyants and seers who apparently specialized in locating bones. (One lady in St. Louis wrote that certain spirits had informed her of the whereabouts of a buried city in the Gobi Desert where a record of man's development from when he "crawled on all fours" to the beginning of recorded history could be found.) Over a thousand letters came from women, most of which were businesslike, but others contained proposals of marriage and other interesting "offers." Hundreds of hopeful young boys looking for adventure wrote to Andrews. One would-be explorer listed his qualifications as follows: "I want to help you find the Missing Link," he wrote. "I have always been interested in old clothes and things that people wore long ago. I can climb trees and I don't get dizzy. I know you will meet terrible dangers. Probably wild can-naballs will try to eat you."

The publicity, especially the emphasis on the Missing Link, raised considerable anxiety in the Museum. Human fossils were exceedingly rare, and both Andrews and Osborn knew that their chances of finding the Missing Link were uncertain. The Museum tried to play down the emphasis on human fossils, but the press would have none of it.

On the day that Andrews departed for Peking in March 1921, he had a final meeting with Osborn. The usually overconfident Andrews expressed his fear that the expedition would fail, that this might be his swan song in exploration. Osborn put his hand on Andrews' shoulder. "Nonsense, Roy," he said. "The fossils are there, I know they are. Go and find them."

TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

The frontispiece to Andrews' autobiography, written some eight years after that meeting with Osborn in 1920, shows the author sitting on a desert hillock. He holds a 6.5 mm Mannlicher rifle in his right hand, and wears a cartridge belt loaded with bullets around his waist. On his feet are dusty leather jackboots. His rumpled wool shirt is rolled up at the sleeves. A worn ranger hat, sporting a pheasant feather, is perched on his heat, cocked at an angle. The man is pictured in profile, his hard, clean jaw slightly elevated, his pale eyes gazing off into the distance. Behind him rise the Flaming Cliffs of Shabarakh Usu, in the heart of the Gobi Desert.

If this description sounds vaguely familiar, there is good reason. Andrews is allegedly the real person that the movie character Indiana Jones was patterned after. Andrews was an accomplished stage-master. He created an image and then lived it out impeccably—there was no chink in his armor. Roy Chapman Andrews: famous explorer, dinosaur hunter, exemplifier of Anglo-Saxon virtues, crack shot, fighter of Mongolian brigands, the man who created the metaphor of "Outer Mongolia" as denoting any exceedingly remote place. Where on earth did this man come from?

Andrews was born in the quiet Midwestern town of Beloit, Wisconsin. After graduating from Beloit College, he worked his way east with money earned from stuffing deer heads and birds. He often said that his only ambition in life was to work at the American Museum of Natural History. He talked his way into the Director's office, and the Director tried to shoo him away with the curt explanation that no jobs were open at the present time. Andrews persisted. "You have to have someone to scrub floors, don't you?" he asked. The Director allowed that he did. Andrews drew himself up. Of course, he explained, he didn't want to wash just
any
floors, "but Museum floors were different."

Accordingly, the Director assigned him to scrubbing floors in the taxidermy department. Soon, Andrews had graduated to collecting whales, in particular one record-size Atlantic right whale that had been brought ashore at Amagansett, Long Island. In a few years he went to Alaska, then Japan, Korea, and China, collecting marine mammals and, later, zoological specimens for the Museum. During this time he eked out an M.A. in mammalogy from Columbia and published two papers.

In April 1922, fifteen years after polishing the Museum's floors, Andrews, with his motorcade, roared through the gateway of the Great Wall of China and headed out over the rolling grasslands of Inner Mongolia, bound for parts unknown. For several days the cars bumped and slid across the plains, stopping along the way to explore various outcrops.

On the fourth day, Andrews had arrived ahead of the rest at their rendezvous point. As he sat relaxing in front of his tent, the last two cars in the caravan careened wildly into camp. The men were obviously excited. The expedition's chief paleontologist, Walter Granger, leaped out of the lead car, puffing violently on his pipe. "Silently," Andrews wrote in his massive book,
The New Conquest of Central Asia,
"he dug into his pockets and produced a handful of bone fragments; out of his shirt came a rhinoceros tooth, and the various folds of his upper garments yielded other fossils." Granger laid them out before Andrews and held out his hand. "Well, Roy," he said, "we've done it. The stuff is here."