EARLY LIFE IN MONGOLIA

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1689, 21 November 1925, Page 2

EARLY LIFE IN MONGOLIA

Tine persistence of the American Museum of Natural History in sending repeated expeditons to Mongolia appears to have been richly rewarded. Two years ago Mr Roy C. Andrews and his scientific colleagues found fossil dinosaurs with their eggs, but this summer they 'have also found many traces, though no remains as yet, of palaeolithic man, says the Daily Telegraph. The reason why Professor H. F. Osborn has for many years past advocated an exploration of the fossil deposits of Mongolia may be stated very simply. That vast country is a lofty and arid plateau, with no mountains and very few rivers. Consequently there is a good chance of finding the fossiled remains of animals in a comparatively undisturbed conditon. This predicton was confirmed two years ago. 'when Mr Andrews, working at a place five hundred miles within the Gobi Desert, came across the complete skeleton of a dinosaur with the nine eggs that she had' just laid before a sandstorm came and buried her. The sand, falling gently, killed but did not crush, and the great reptile, with her eggs, remained slowly fossilising through perhaps ten millon years.

In Professor Osborn's view, these Mongolian dinosaurs were ancestors of the still larger land reptiles found in'Western America, such as the famous diplodocus that we may see at the Natural History Museum. Indeed, he inclines to regard Mongolia as a centre of dispersal of animal life—as the region, that is, whei\e the main kinds of orders developed first, and whence they spread to other parts of the earth. To establish such a daring hypothesis we need, of course, infinitely more evidence than is yet available, but the American scientists who have repeatedly braved the terrors of the Gobi Desert in the search for fossils have, at any rate, made the theory seem plausible. This summer Mr Andrews bas discovered siv mammalian skull. and the remains of a giant rhinoceros, presumably in strata above those containing the dinosaurs. But special interest attaches to his finding of arrow heads, spear points, drills, and the Hie relics of man of the Old Stone because very little is known of man's presence in Mongolia in the remote past, long before the Mongols lived there. Mr Andrews's discoveries should throw welcome light on the migrations of those remote ancestors of ours in the -Glacial Period, who apparently roamed over the whole earth, since their weapons and tools are much the same wherever they are found, whether in England or Egypt or Turkestan. Thus the New World, through Mr -Andrews and his generous supporters, is helping to elucidate the earliest history of the Old.