Eighty million years ago,
disaster came to a world ruled by dinosaurs.
It came in waves of and and wind
that buried every creature alive.
For eons, the dinosaurs lay entombed
in a place that would one day be called
the Gobi Desert in a country named Mongolia.
Among the dead
was one of the strangest dinosaurs that ever lived.
It was called Oviraptor.
It was swift, smart, lethal.
Now, only bones tell us about its life.
And the vicious world it lived in.
The bones have given us
a glimpse of those ancient times.
A dim reflection of life before history.
But there is more to the story... still hidden
in the vast emptiness of the Gobi.
Now an ambitious expedition
is traveling to that distant desert
to uncover the secrets of the Oviraptor"s world.
They don"t exactly look like scientists.
Often, they"re mistaken for each other.
But Mike Novacek leads the expedition,
along with colleague Mark Norell.
They could be taken for surfers;
but they"re from
the American Museum of Natural History -
scientists piecing together an ancient jigsaw puzzle
of evolution and extinction.
To me it"s so obviously important,
l"m so emotionally bound up in this.
I can"t imagine why a knowledge of our history of
where we come from isn"t important to human experience.
Could you imagine what it would be like
to live in the late 20th century
and not know that extinction actually existed?
There"s also just this sense of discovery.
I mean, every bone that we find
tells us something about how the world
was 80 millions years ago, which is... pretty neat.
Just having a sense of history of what the planet was like
and what the planet has gone through,
I think, just increases our appreciation
for our own existence.
Mike and Mark are about to journey
to the sun scorched badlands of the Gobi.
It"s a desolate area -
a half million dusty square miles of sand, scrub,
and redrock cliffs.
But it"s a paleontologist"s version of heaven.
For this is where the Oviraptors lived and died
and lay untouched in the earth for millennia.
Then, in 1922, one of the most famous scientific
expeditions in history wound its way toward
Mongolia"s dinosaur graveyard
lts leader was a charismatic
and... ontroversial explorer
named Roy Chapman Andrews.
Like Mark and Mike, he came from the
American Museum of Natural History.
But Andrews was an incurable publicity hound -
and a scientific cowboy.
Where his paleontologist used a camel-hair brush,
Andrews hacked away with a pick ax.
But he found one of the
richest dinosaur boneyards in the world.
He returned with a spectacular collection of fossils...
and a library of stunning film images.
But in the 1920s,
Communists seized power in Mongolia.
The open door to the West slammed shut.
For the next 65 years,
the fabulous fossil fields of the Gobi
were forbidden territory.
Now, everything"s changed.
Only token symbols of Russia"s domination remain.
Finally, Western scientists can return.
We don"t want those onions?
They rot. They rot in two days.
Mark and Mike were among
the first scientists allowed in.
They"re now back for their sixth expedition
with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences.
Three kilos?
Three kilos.
They have just enough supplies for a short month,
and a long way to go... retracing Andrews" footsteps
on their way to one of the richest
concentrations of fossils in the world -
a place called Ukhaa Tolgod.
Over a vast span of time,
Ukhaa Tolgod was ruled by dinosaurs.
Dinosaur history can be thought of
as a great empire that lasted
a few hundred million years.
That"s a significant slice of the history of life.
Imagine that time,
from the moment the dinosaurs appeared till now,
is a single day.
At midnight, dinosaurs first walked earth.
They"re flourishing at noon.
They don"t go extinct until five in the afternoon.
Time passes.
The first modern man finally appears
a minute and a half before midnight.
All of our recorded history takes three and a half seconds
In the Gobi, time seems to have stood still.
The Gobi is such a big place
and it basically has no life support system.
We really have to bring everything with us.
So all our food, all our fuel
which we"re carrying in a fuel tanker,
all our supplies have to be treated like we"re
actually exploring a polar region.
In such a vast area, success is never certain.
Even getting there can be a nightmare.
Roy Chapman Andrews
thought he"d solved the problem in the "20s,
with a new piece of technology.
When it was announced that we were to attempt
a scientific exploration of the Gobi Desert
with a fleet of motor cars,
men said that we were little less than fools.
Only camels had been used in that country.
We had 40 men, eight motor cars
and 150 camels to carry supplies.
It was the biggest land scientific expedition
ever to leave the United States.
Roy Chapman Andrews.
From China, Andrews headed northwest.
He left Peking, then crossed over the border
and drove deep into the parched heart
of outer Mongolia.
Mongolia, a land of painted deserts dancing in mirage.
Mongolia, a land of mystery, of paradox and promise!
A thirsty land. A land of desolation!
Gazelles, wild asses, and wolves ranged
the marching sands.
Few explorers had been there and they brought back tales
of thirst, cold, and hunger.
But Andrews found one more thing... mud.
Our average speed was only four miles an hour.
Rocks, ravines, washouts, and ditches
followed one another in rapid succession.
One might imagine that the roads have gotten better.
They have not.
And even modern jeeps aren"t built
for a desert like the Gobi.
We have an electrical problem and we don"t know what it is.
It"s not a very complicated wiring plan.
It"s a Russian jeep.
It"s not like a Japanese or an American car.
They"re up and running.
But next, it"s a truck"s turn.
Piston, huh?
We think it"s piston number six.
A critical breakdown could have severe consequences.
End of the expedition, if not the end of our lives.
Maybe we"ll make it. Oh, God.
With the nearest gas station some 500 miles away,
and time already getting tight,
things will have to go smoothly from now on.
Oh, we"re having some mechanical problems.
We think it"s a fuel pump. But we"re not sure.
This could be way bad.
Seems to me I got this thing in there
without doing the twisty deal.
Maybe we"ll tow it or abandon it.
Abandon it. Get on with it.
We can"t stay here more than a day.
After more than 12 breakdowns,
the vehicles all decide to run at the same time.
As they enter the dusty dinosaur fields of the Gobi,
they"re traveling a long way backwards in time.
Dinosaurs first appeared some 230 million years ago,
in a world with a different face.
The creatures were thriving 100 million years later,
as South America and Africa split apart.
About 75 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous period,
dinosaurs began to disappear... leaving only bones behind.
Their bones were more motionless than the continents
Then in the 1920s, Roy Chapman Andrews
came to a remote place in the Gobi Desert
he would name the Flaming Cliffs.
It was a likely- looking place.
There appear to be medieval castles with spires and turrets
brick-red in the evening light,
colossal gateways, walls and ramparts.
A labyrinth of ravines and gorges studded
with fossil bones make a paradise
for the paleontologist.
Without a doubt there were hundreds of bones
lying just beneath the surface.
But where?
If only my eyes could pierce that
baffling surface and get a glimpse
of what lay concealed!
Within minutes, they were finding fossils.
Andrews and his team
had stumbled onto the mother lode of dinosaur bones.
They discovered the remains of some 200 different animals,
many of them completely new species.
The fossils revealed a world
that Andrews found alien and terrifying.
Dinosaurs were the sort of creatures
you might think of as inhabiting another planet
or the kind you dream of in a bad nightmare.
It was an image our culture nourished for generations.
Dinosaurs were fierce,
monstrous... and not all that bright.
Many of the new ideas about dinosaurs
are coming from the amazing boneyard called Ukhaa Tolgod.
The team discovered the site three years ago.
Now, to get to the dinosaurs,
all they have to do... is find it again.
The maps in general are pretty lousy for the Gobi Desert.
The towns on those maps are myths in many cases.
We don"t even pay any attention to
any of the roads marked on those maps.
They"re completely wrong.
Even a satellite tracking system doesn"t always help.
So the satellite may know where you are
but the road you need may be in a
completely different direction
so the roads here are very confusing.
There are no signs and many of them lead nowhere.
We"re gonna go like this.
We"re a little off course. We"re not really lost.
We"re just a bit off course.
So we"ve gotta go this-away and that-away.
At times, you have to go in circles to move forward.
Roy Chapman Andrews too spent more than a few days
wandering the Gobi.
But in the end,
he blundered into a discovery that stunned the world.
A member of his expedition literally stumbled across
a critical link in the great chain of being.
On July 13, George Olsen reported
that he had found some fossil eggs.
We did not take his story very seriously.
Nevertheless,
we were all curious enough to go with him
to inspect his find.
There could be no mistake.
Our paleontologist finally said,
"Gentlemen, there is no doubt about it.
You are looking at the first dinosaur egg ever found."
The discovery made Roy Chapman Andrews a national hero.
But the eggs were not alone.
Lying above the nest was a bizarre skeleton -
a bird-like dinosaur unknown to man.
It had apparently been caught in the act of murder -
stealing the eggs.
So it was forever cursed with the name Oviraptor -
Latin for "egg thief."
It would be years
before we discovered the strange truth
about the animal called Oviraptor.
In the late "20s, the winds of change
blew fiercely over the great dinosaur
fields of Mongolia.
That"s when Roy Chapman Andrews
was forced to leave the Gobi forever.
We are more than ever convinced that Central Asia
was a paleontology Garden of Eden.
Still, we have shown the way, have broken trail as it were.
Later, others will reap a rich harvest.
Decades later,
Mark and Mike are hoping to find
the treasures that Andrews left untouched in the sand.
After more than a week in the blistering Gobi,
they finally reach their goal: The brown hills of Ukhaa Tolgod
With all the delays,
they"ve only got two weeks to work.
This is the place
where they"ve pinned all their hopes.
With luck, a year of shifting sands has
exposed more bones.
But even here, there are no guarantees.
It is possible to fail in the Gobi.
It"s a huge area, a huge tract of land,
there are lots of rocks.
But they don"t all contain fossils.
You can drive to what looks like the most
tantalizing set of badlands you could possibly imagine
and not find one scrap of bone.
It"s a treasure hunt in a way
and it is sort of like finding a needle in a haystack.
But on this day,
Discovery and elation are immediate.
Oh, I see it.
Oh, wonderful.
Jeez.
That"s nice.
Back to lizard
The side of a skull here.
The teeth sticking out.
You can see these teeth, yeah.
Each one of these is a socket for a tooth.
Pretty big.
This is a hand claw.
Has this big thing right here on it...
it"s the hand of an Oviraptor. About medium size.
They"ve hit the jackpot:
Among their first finds are Oviraptors -
the creature Andrews knew as "egg thief."
Considering that the Oviraptor is one of the rarest dinosaurs
in the world and there"s only been a handful
of specimens found before we discovered this place
where we"ve found 25.
I mean, today we found at least five
just in the first 20 minutes.
This is really not what paleontology is like,
most of the time.
You don"t go finding 12 skeletons in a half an hour.
There"s another one right there, too.
Yup.
Each one of these little mounds of little white flecks sticking out...
that"s the eroded rubble of parts of big dinosaur skeletons
One, two, three, four four skeletons right here.
This is going to be a really good specimen.
This is part of a shoulder right here.
Let me see.
This looks, is looking like a tail.
That"s the tail and part of the pelvic girdle here
and the tail shooting straight out.
This is nice.
I mean, what we"re seeing here is just awful.
I mean, all these poor dinosaurs
and other creatures... mammals and vertebrates -
buried alive possibly and skeletons littering
the surface like some battlefield.
But it"s great for us "cause we thrive on carnage.
We don"t have enough tape.
We oughta count everything here.
Once, scores of dinosaurs walked the sands
of Ukhaa Tolgod moving toward a tragic destiny.
I think this was an oasis 80 million years ago.
Huge numbers of dinosaurs and other vertebrates
congregating around maybe some water.
And on occasions,
not just one event but on several occasions,
these animals were buried in these sands.
We"d have to imagine an enormous sandstorm,
an enormous force bearing down
on these creatures for such a disaster.
Some of the dinosaurs almost look like they"re trying
to swim to the surface,
much like a skier in an avalanche caught,
in some cases, in their struggle
to get out of this sand avalanche,
or great wall of sand, that engulfed them.
Perhaps they suffocated in the sand.
Hey, I just swept there.
You"ve made it all dirty again.
I take pride in my work.
Next year we"ll bring some dust busters.
The prehistoric sandstorms
buried dinosaurs at every stage of life.
And on their first expedition here,
Mark and Mike made an unprecedented discovery:
A nest with eggs and inside one was an embryo -
the embryo of an Oviraptor,
like a dinosaur on the half shell.
Here was the vicious carnivore, the "egg thief,"
just a tiny baby about to hatch.
It was an important discovery -
a secret moment in the very beginning
of this strange dinosaur"s life.
This year,
they"re hoping to find out more
about the Oviraptor and its fate.
There"s growing excitement on the far side of the ridge.
They think they"ve found
a completely new kind of dinosaur,
a relative of the Oviraptor, and it may shed light on
what ultimately happened to the dinosaurs.
We have no idea what this is.
It"s a really big animal.
It might be something new.
This specimen has a lot of important
implications that go beyond
just being a really beautiful object.
So it"s exactly
what we wanted to find... we hope.
The skeleton is what"s important.
Mark and Mike believe that these bones may help prove
an exciting theory -
that some dinosaurs actually evolved.
They evolved into creatures that are still alive today.
The bones tell the story.
There are uncanny similarities
in the skeletons of certain dinosaurs -
like these and modern birds.
Almost without doubt,
they shared a close common ancestor.
And each new find may help prove
that dinosaurs did not really go extinct,
that birds, in fact, are dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs need to be thought
of as incredibly successful animals
that exist with us today.
We just call them birds.
Our skies are filled with dinosaurs.
It"s a bad metaphor
to use to call something like dinosaur-like,
you know... just because it"s old,
obsolete, ugly, stupid, and slow.
I mean, that"s not what these animals are all about.
I mean, it"s like the swifts flying around here and things
I mean, they"re a type of dinosaur.
And that they"re still with us now.
And the closest relative to birds
is these small carnivorous dinosaurs
we"ve collected in these red rocks.
At day"s end, hopes are high that this new find
will help connect the dots between dinosaurs and birds.
The feeling of anticipation is palpable,
if not always exactly in key.
First thing in the morning, they"re back at the site.
So, we hope we got something we can identify eventually.
Mike, work on that.
Kill that beetle, while you"re at it.
As they pry the rock open, they sense trouble.
Look at that.
Yeah.
I don"t know what that is.
Bunch of... maybe. L"m afraid to say.
Could it be a theropod, maybe?
No.
Well, it could be, but...
It"s not known to science.
I think what we"re lookin" at
is that there"s a dead theropod right there.
It"s gone and we"re excavating an ankylosaur.
And the ankylosaurs
are among the most common dinosaurs around.
It"s not a new dinosaur at all.
It"s not even related to birds.
L"m sure that this is an ankylosaur.
You want us to just go away?
What they want to do now is give up.
Today, the dinosaur hunters
have tracked down approximately zilch.
Well, you win a few and you lose a few.
That"s just... I don"t feel too good right now
l"m tired.
They"ve spent two fruitless days
working in the blistering heat.
But tomorrow will be another day -
with any luck, a better one.
Instead, nature decides to add insult to injury.
As Mongolian would say, "Ich boro." lt"s raining.
Sounds like l"m bored.
Yeah, it sounds like l"m bored.
The sun burns off the disappointment.
It"s a new day and a new dig.
This find is not a new species.
It"s not related to birds.
And it"s not an Oviraptor.
But it probably was the Oviraptor"s prey.
It"s an animal called Protoceratops.
They called these guys the cows of the Cretaceous.
They were sort of everywhere.
They roamed around, they think,
maybe in herds.
It"s full of spikes.
We actually call it Spikey now.
We"ve sort of bonded with this one.
These are the eyes and the snout.
So we"re looking at the skull from the top.
These are... cheek spikes
and the frill covering the neck here.
Protoceratops was a bizarre dinosaur,
a hog-sized animal with a beak like a parrot"s,
a strict vegetarian that grazed the ancient Gobi.
Around its head was an elaborate shield,
but the shield didn"t protect it from its enemies.
Enemies like the Oviraptor.
And that"s exactly
what the team digs up next... Oviraptors.
A pair of them lying so close together
they seem to describe an ancient romance.
Yeah, we"re kind of fond of them.
We"re trying to figure out what names to give them.
Ozzie and Harriet. Romeo and Juliet.
Batman and Robin.
Well, we have a hypothesis they were holding hands
and they were sort of reaching for each other
across the miles.
The star-crossed Oviraptors
are given the permanent nicknames of Romeo and Juliet.
We have one hand just down here.
This is the other one.
Christa now is gluing another hand.
And this is, of course,
the neck coming up and the head and the hip bone.
And over here we have a claw.
It"s a long hard process to excavate the past.
But they"ve done it before.
Over the last few years,
they"ve uncovered a world of almost preposterous beings.
Some are related to birds.
Others are even related to us.
Our tiny ancestors -
mammals that lived alongside the Oviraptors.
Most of these mammals were small,
like early mice and shrews.
But these insignificant creatures
gradually evolved into all the mammals
of our world - the cats, the aardvarks,
the whales and even human beings.
But sometimes evolution...
has to take a back seat to hygiene.
We don"t have much water here,
so it"s kind of hard to get things clean.
I thought I packed more shorts.
For some reason, I messed up.
L"ve got these on delicate.
Yeah, personal grooming is a passion of the camp here.
The team spends a lot of time making sure
that they"re groomed,
looking their best at all times,
because you never know.
There may be some formal affairs
in a nearby village that you might need to attend.
There are only a few days left.
It"s time for the second act of Romeo and Juliet:
The Oviraptors await
a sheltering shroud of rags and plaster.
They"re now in the skillful hands
of preparator Amy Davidson.
I love skeletons.
I actually never was that into dinosaurs as a kid,
but l"ve always loved bones.
And I have a background as a sculptor
and l"ve always admired
the skeleton that we all have inside us.
It"s some of the most beautiful sculpture on earth.
And these fossil skeletons look almost as well preserved
as yesterday"s camel skeleton
But they are a dinosaur.
These fossils are forever.
It almost lasted forever.
For 80 million years, Romeo and Juliet lay together
reaching toward each other in death.
What were they like in life?
Did they hunt together?
Share food with each other?
Fight with each other?
Or was this love among the Oviraptors?
Scientists may never know for certain
if the bird-like Oviraptors fell in love.
But now there"s a new find that digs even deeper
into the private lives of the dinosaurs -
a place paleontologists usually enter
only in their best dreams.
Oh, yeah, it"s farther down.
They"ve discovered another Oviraptor.
And then, in the dirt below the skeleton... eggs,
an entire nest.
How many eggs now revealed?
Uh, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
And then three over there... twelve.
Twelve eggs. All right.
Another one coming out right here.
It"s really a great fossil find
because it"s one of the rare instances
where we can capture a little bit of behavior
that"s 80 million years old.
Here we have a sort of day in the life
of or the death of a creature of a dinosaur...
in association with something it did during its life.
This one was fossilized where it dropped and
it happened to drop right on top of its own nest.
She didn"t just drop there.
The good mother Oviraptor was sitting on the nest.
They probably brought food to their nest, as birds do.
And the good mother tended her eggs.
Like a bird, she prodded them into a circle
The fearsome carnivore of the Gobi was parenting.
So the story of the dinosaur named "egg thief"
has finally come full circle.
The Oviraptors watched over their eggs
and took care of the nest.
Now, they will never be seen
as simply nightmare creatures again.
The dig has been everything the team could hope for.
But to see what they"ve really got,
they have to get all the fossils safely
out of the ground,
and then take them on a trip exactly
halfway around the world.
She athed in plaster, Romeo and Juliet are now heavy
but dangerously delicate... like Rice Krispies wrapped in concrete.
No, no.
That way.
Okay, okay.
Sorry.
I thought you were going to push backwards.
Perfect.
It"s beautiful, Amy.
More, more, more, more, more.
It"s beautiful.
More, more, more, more.
Okay.
Nothing came out.
All right, Amy.
So far, so good.
Now they have to convince the good mother Oviraptor
to come down from her hillside perch.
It"s like moving a grand piano off a cliff.
Romeo and Juliet prove just as stubborn.
L"m happy.
Just drive slowly, please?
Lt"s not there yet. It could get lost in the mail.
They do get lost in the mail.
The good mother Oviraptor
and Romeo and Juliet are trucked east.
And then, they disappear... lost, somewhere in China.
After four months bound up in Chinese red tape,
the dinosaur fossils finally make it
to their destination...
the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The first arrival is Juliet.
She"s headed for Amy"s lab, where, if all goes well,
they"ll find out what ancient secrets
lie beneath the recent coat of plaster.
L"m really glad this is here. This is great
From the summer in the Gobi to
the winter in New York City.
Juliet is now a seasoned world traveler.
After 80 million years of repose
She, s the new kid on the block.
There"s a lot of questions at this point.
There could be anything in here.
I have a feeling that this one"s going
to be a nice skeleton - this is my guess -
a nice skeleton, hopefully with a skull,
all laid out.
It"s pretty fun. And it"s all mine.
It"s a tricky business... millimeters
make all the difference.
Yeah, this is good.
L"m really glad
I didn"t saw through a bone in the process.
It"s weird.
It"s just opening this little window
into this world I was living last summer.
Yeah, this looks good.
After all this work, they still don"t know
if Juliet is an important specimen,
whether her skeleton is perfect or a total ruin.
This is great.
L"m really psyched, "cause this is the skull.
It does have a skull. We"re really, really happy.
I like, you know, working late at night.
It"s really hard to go home because...
I just look at it and say, "I can"t believe this."
Lt"s traveled 80 million years
and halfway around the world and it"s sitting here
and, you know, it"s a dinosaur.
Working late?
Yeah.
And it"s so beautiful.
The more I work on it,
the more you see this natural sculpture.
My work just sort of disappears
and this beautiful thing comes out of the rock.
The process takes weeks.
Finally, Juliet is revealed in all her splendor.
She"s everything they"ve been hoping for,
perhaps the most perfect specimen ever found -
a dinosaur for the ages.
It"s a beautiful fossil.
In fact, I mean,
that I think that this is probably
the best prepared and the best preserved
Oviraptor that"s yet been worked on from
our expedition - or even anywhere in the world
I think we"re going to have the,
to be able to relish in the fruits
of last summer for many years to come.
It makes you wonder what"s still out there.
She"s more than a pretty face
These bones will help us trace
the evolution of dinosaurs into birds.
Meanwhile, Juliet makes a scientist dream
about the world she left behind.
I think what fascinates me is the broad picture.
What was it like
if you were flying in a little Piper Cub over that area,
like some of the bush pilots do over the Serengeti?
What would it look like then -
all those dinosaurs and the
mammals and the lizards... and the Gobi?
After six long summers,
Mark and Mike have uncovered the hidden secrets
of the Gobi... making Juliet"s world feel almost real.
You could picture a lake perhaps and some cliffs
and a bunch of Oviraptors on a cliff
like a colony of seabirds, perhaps.
And a bunch of these tanklike ankylosaurs
lumbering around near the pond
and perhaps a herd of Protoceratops
wandering through.
And every once in a while a vicious Velociraptor
coming over the hill to nab something.
And we can imagine the Oviraptors:
Romeo and Juliet, hunting together,
and the good mother, minding her eggs.
Unnoticed in its low station
is our own ancestor,
a tiny tense creature lost among
the powerful beings of the ancient Gobi.
In the end,
they would all disappear from the face of the earth -
along with most of the creatures of their world.
From our perspective, of course,
this mass extinction event is not a big problem
because we"re part of the group
that survived and started evolving into bats
and large hoofed animals and lions and tigers and bears...
and ultimately humans.
Ultimately, humans, like the Oviraptors,
and most of the dinosaur kingdom,
may not be able to count on permanent residence on earth.
Every species that"s ever lived
Has become extinct or will become extinct.
And whether extinction is due to
the total decimation of our population
or whether it"s due to the evolution of
that species into another species,
nevertheless, everybody becomes extinct eventually.
So in that view, we"ve had it.
Some species lived and then died out:
A story like any other story.
Others evolved, changed and lived on.
So perhaps a message about our own future
is encoded in these silent remnants of the past.
The only real knowledge we have of our distant
biological past is from the fossil record.
And it gives us a sense of who we are
and where we sit in the world
and what that world might become.
Time is the hardest rock to pierce,
and the story of life, with its infinite changes,
is the greatest mystery we have.
But the expedition has been blessed with luck.
They"ve gazed into the past and brought the violent
and tender world of the Oviraptor
that much closer to our own.