23 Eggs

Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews returned to Manhattan last week and at once went to his headquarters, the American Museum of Natural History. Two years he had been away, grubbing the Gobi desert sands and rocks for Central Asiatic fossils. He found enough to fill 90 large packing cases. Chinese Nationalists tried to prevent his taking the bones to the Museum. They wanted them for their own exhibits. A little blarney, a little diplomatic pressure, a little gold, and a great deal of expostulation quieted the demands of the Chinese patriots.

Bones of the "Woolworth" beast were in the cases. Living (about six million years ago), it was bigger than a motor bus. It stood 15 feet high at the shoulder; its body was 25 feet long, its neck 12 feet long. It must have weighed 20 tons or more than 20 draft horses weigh. In a way it was related to horses. But it resembled more a rhinoceros, another horse relative. The new-found beast ate grass.

Another interesting, but not unique, find was the skull of a titanothere, an archaic tapir. The skull is saddle shaped. The nose bone stands straight up and reaches three feet above the eyes. At the top tip is a flat bulblike button. The titanic beast browsed on the marsh grasses of the Gobi plateau before the region became desert.

Interesting also were 23 eggs that Explorer Andrews found. Their identity is not yet certain. He believes them laid by the duckbill iguanodon. That old, toothed dinosaur had a bulky, aldermanic body, a thick tail, and a squat, malicious-looking head. Yet it was "a timorous vegetable-eating creature, obliged to be wary of its flesh-eating dinosaur neighbours. To escape them it ran on its great hind legs. Its front legs were short and handy. So in posture it resembled a bird.

Dr. Andrews was looking for animal bones. But he found traces of people living in that Central Asiatic district 20,000 years ago. They were hunters, with spears and arrows; they partially domesticated wild horses and isses; they lived generation after generation in villages built against the shelter of Gobi sand dunes, near lakes that then existed. Next March Dr. Andrews goes back to their neighbourhood, to try to learn more about their existence, and dispersion over Asia, Europe and probably the Americas.