Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliff

One of the fields of study opened up by the collapse of Communism is, oddly enough, that of the distant past: Western archeologists have for the first time in six decades been allowed to explore the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. This is the region explored in the 1930s by the famed Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History. It is also the region wonderfully described in this stirring book by Michael Novacek, the current curator of the museum's department of vertebrate paleontology, who led the recent expeditions onto the high desert and into the heart of the Cretaceous Period in Asia. In 1993, Novacek's expedition found an astonishing trove of fossils in a wasteland called Ukhaa Tolgod, not too far from the Flaming Cliffs where Andrews made his most important finds. But, as with all great travel adventure stories, getting to Ukhaa Tolgod is the real tale.