GOBI DESERT, Mongolia — Dr. Badamkhatan Zorigt was quiet, his fingers tracing the exposed, fossilized remains at his feet. A scattering of ribs and the tucked structure of a hind leg lay all pale white against the red sandstone of the Gobi’s Flaming Cliffs. The whole of humanity’s understanding of natural history hinged here in 1923 when Roy Chapman Andrews found nests of what were originally thought to be Protoceratops eggs during one of his many Central Asiatic Expeditions, confirming for the first time that the ancient reptiles were oviparous.
Badamkhatan looked up at the crowd gathered around him, his deep brown eyes bright with excitement as he pulled a GPS from his pocket to mark the find’s location. It was a new and slender piece of the natural history puzzle. When someone asked what the fossils were, there was no hiding the thrill in his voice.
“I don’t know.”
As the head of the vertebrate paleontology division at the Institute of Paleontology and Geology of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, he’s part of a small team working to catalog and study the nearly endless trove of Cretaceous-period fossils hidden in that wide, red desert. He has spent his adult life poring over the delicate remains of creatures that called this place home some 80 million years ago. The fact that the weathered sandstone can still serve up a surprise for him is a testament to all that’s hidden out here.
Badamkhatan, or Badmaa as he insists we call him, works out of a small building in Ulaanbaatar, tucked in an alley behind a restaurant a short hike from the expansive, Soviet-era city square. Mongolia serves as the perfect estuary between northern and southern Asia, its culture a finely grained mix of influences from its neighbors. So much of the architecture is Soviet, the signs lettered in Cyrillic, and nearly all of the vehicles on the road are secondhand models from South Korea, Japan, and China. It’s a miracle mix of right-hand-drive JDM Prius hatchbacks with lifted suspensions to contend with the country’s roads (or in some places, lack thereof), hammered, left-hand-drive Land Cruisers, and Mitsubishi Pajeros. There are American-market vehicles, the odd Wrangler or F-150, but they’re few and far between.
We were there at the Institute, two days before, dust and grit crunching beneath the soles of our shoes, the smell of curing resin and earth thick in the air. The place had the feel of a library, quiet save for the tender scratch of tool on stone. Towering stacks of crates and plaster-wrapped fossils lined the main hall, all waiting their turn beneath the careful hands of patient workers.
“The research never ends,” Badmaa said, pointing to a freshly opened plaster jacket, a complete Tarbosaurus skull grinning inside, its teeth longer than my palm. The massive carnivore is a cousin to the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, though Badmaa says recent research bolsters the theory that the beasts were scavengers, not predators. The hypothesis sprang from a close look at intact leg structures, including the ratio between femur and tibia/fibula. The math indicates they weren’t the fast, lethal runners of cinema lore and juvenile nightmare.
“It doesn’t make us very popular at elementary schools,” Badmaa joked.
Badmaa and his team have no shortage of work, thanks in part to a recent Infiniti-supported expedition through the Gobi. The Japanese automaker and the Explorers Club Hong Kong Chapter set out on a 20-day trek in June, covering some 1,000 miles of open Gobi in an attempt to map and document new potential dig sites. Much of that effort was aimed at leveraging drones equipped with lidar (a laser-based, radarlike surveying method used for 3-D mapping that also figures prominently in autonomous vehicle systems) and other imaging devices, allowing paleontologists to scout more ground in less time, with higher resolution than before. In the past, the scientists have had to rely only on grainy satellite images to help direct their efforts, eyeing the topography for the shales and sandstones indicative of the Cretaceous and employing a bit of hit-or-miss guessing.
The expedition unearthed hundreds of fossils, but for the scientists in Mongolia, the drone data is far more valuable, having mapped hundreds of kilometers of open desert down to the centimeter. The expedition identified some 250 previously undiscovered fossil beds, all of which will provide Badmaa and the other researchers at the Institute with years of productive exploration. Once the drone team processes the footage, volunteers can scan the images, identify fossils already on the surface, and tag their GPS coordinates for paleontologists to examine in the field at a later date.
It’s difficult to convey how amazing that is. Just getting to the Gobi from Ulaanbaatar is a feat. Flights from the capital to Dalanzadgad, the closest airport, are unreliable, subject to cancellation due to crushing rain, dangerous winds, or both. Our Fokker 50 touched down in dawn’s dim hours just long enough to dump us on the tarmac and take off again. The pavement ended at the airport parking lot, terminating in a spider web of two-track ruts that sprawled out into the darkness. Seeing a line of gleaming Infiniti QX80, QX60, and QX50 models waiting to ferry us across the desert was a shock after a day in the capital. They looked like a line of high heels in a world of hiking boots.
When asked why Infiniti would commit its resources to a project like the Gobi expedition, the answer was always, “Why not?”
We threw our kit into a QX80 and climbed in, figuring that, of all the machines there, the Nissan Patrol-derived brawler would be best suited to bashing across the desert. It’s two hours from the airport to the Three Camel Lodge, our base camp, and we naively hoped to catch a few moments of sleep before sunrise. Except dozing in a vehicle requires a road, and where we were going, there was no such thing. Our driver calmly aimed the truck at the taillights ahead, dim red orbs in a thick sea of dust, and planted the throttle, ripping across the ground at 60 mph. Our world shrank to what the headlights could touch: scraps of low vegetation, khaki sand, and opaque walls of airborne grit.
These machines had already endured the expedition across the Gobi, suffering more abuse in a month than most Infinitis will see in a lifetime, and they had the rattles to prove it. It was hard to reconcile the vehicles with the place. Infiniti isn’t a brand known for trudging across the wastes. It doesn’t even have an official dealer network in Mongolia. But productive science and exploration have always courted the support of open-minded individuals, organizations, and corporations, be it for glory or profit. When asked why Infiniti would commit to a project like this, the answer was always, “Why not?”
It’s an unusual response from an automaker now, when every answer, name, and paint code must be pressed and filtered through workshops, attorneys, focus groups, and marketing teams. And while it should have come off as a stunt, it didn’t. Because of all the automakers touting themselves as rugged go-anywhere brands, none of them were so bold as to launch themselves at the Gobi. We weren’t tearing across the darkness in a Jeep. We weren’t doing our best to outrun the sunrise in a Land Rover. We didn’t dart through the center of a herd of camels in a Geländewagen. We did it in an Infiniti. Mongolians like to say that it’s better to have seen their country once than to have heard of it a thousand times. Likewise, for men and machines, it is better to do a thing once than to spend an eternity claiming you can.
By the time we arrived at the Three Camel Lodge, we were ragged with adrenaline, the first soft light of the morning just beginning to beat back the night’s grays and blacks. Every sunrise is a gift, but there are slim words for what we saw as the sun rose: land, unfettered by field or fence from horizon to horizon. I was unprepared for the endless miles of sky and the sprawling, green desert. An ocean of it, the sight of which requested a stillness in everyone. A herd of horses watered nearby, more than I’ve ever seen together in one place. Mongolia has more than 4.5 million of them, and the nomads who tend their herds in the Gobi count them by stallion. One male’s harem might hold two mares or 12, plus all of their foals. Mongolia is a country that will not stop amazing you.
The Lodge is its own wonder, a strap-and-beam building with beautiful arched eaves. A place for the weary and wonderstruck. Its owner, Jalsa Urubshurow, met us on the front porch with an open bottle and a warm smile. He’s something of a national legend, having helped bootstrap Mongolia’s tourist economy once democracy came to the country in 1990. He grew up in a Mongolian community in Howell Township, New Jersey, after his parents fled Stalinist persecution in the ’50s, started his own construction company, made his fortune, and helped form the North America–Mongolia Business Council in 1991.
Nomadic Expeditions, a company that specializes in tailoring trips deep into Mongolia for Western visitors, sprang from the council, and the Lodge arose as a logical extension as an ecologically sound, luxury accommodation for those visitors. It’s staffed entirely by Mongolians, all of whom are paid a wage on par with or in excess of what they could make in Ulaanbaatar, Urubshurow said.
The place is without connectivity of any kind. There is no internet and no cell reception—a true oasis. It served as our base camp for two days as we wandered the region in the Infinitis, following our guides deeper into the Gobi, sifting through sand and searching for fossils alongside Badmaa. Fossil hunting, even with the added benefit of detailed drone mapping, requires patience and a keen eye.
“It’s much better to be lucky than good,” Badmaa said.
Most of us are neither, but it was still spectacular when one of the group spotted the find at the Flaming Cliffs the day before we were set to depart. The remains had lain right there in the stone for 80 million years. It was a very real connection, a spark across millennia, to see and touch them now. In a few weeks, once the journalists packed their bags and headed home, Badmaa and his team would return to the find, carefully unearth it, and transport it back to Ulaanbaatar to see where it fits with the puzzle pieces already gathered, to see what story it could tell us.
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