Blurs

At first glance, Mongolia's Gobi Desert seems almost entirely inhospitable. There are enormous distances of bare rock and gravel, towering cliffs, shifting sands and mountains rising from an otherwise austere landscape. Water can be scarce and temperatures can swing dramatically between extremes. Yet the Gobi contains one of the world's extraordinary fossil archives. Hidden within its rocks are the remains of animals and plants that lived tens of millions of years ago, when parts of what is now Mongolia looked nothing like the desert we see today. There were rivers and floodplains. Lakes and wetlands existed in some regions. Dunes migrated across increasingly dry landscapes. Vegetation supported huge herbivorous dinosaurs, while predators followed them. Beneath the feet of these giants lived a much less conspicuous population of mammals, lizards, birds and insects. The fossils of the Gobi therefore tell us something considerably more interesting than which dinosaurs once lived ...

Few fossils have captured the imagination of scientists and the public quite like the famous “Fighting Dinosaurs” specimen from Mongolia.  Discovered in the Gobi Desert in 1971, this extraordinary fossil appears to preserve the final moments of a deadly struggle between a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops. More than 70 million years after their deaths, the two dinosaurs remain locked together in what looks remarkably like a fight to the death. For palaeontologists, the specimen is far more than an impressive display piece. It provides one of the clearest snapshots of dinosaur behaviour ever discovered, offering rare evidence of predator-prey interaction preserved in stone. A Discovery in the Gobi Desert The fossil was unearthed during a joint Polish-Mongolian expedition at Tugriken Shireh in the Djadokhta Formation, a region of the Gobi Desert renowned for its exceptionally preserved dinosaur remains. The area was already famous for discoveries such as Velociraptor, Protoceratops an...