Flaming Cliffs
Interesting facts
- The first Velociraptor fossil known to science, a crushed but complete skull with a hand claw, was dug up here by Peter Kaisen on 11 August 1923.
- The type specimen of Oviraptor was found lying over a nest of about fifteen eggs, its skull separated from them by only some 10 cm of sediment.
- Henry Fairfield Osborn named three new dinosaurs from the 1923 finds here in a single 1924 paper: Oviraptor, Velociraptor and Saurornithoides.
- Before giving it a formal name, Osborn mentioned Velociraptor in a popular press article as "Ovoraptor djadochtari", a name that was later dropped.
- Oviraptor's species name, philoceratops, was meant to underline its supposed appetite for the eggs of horned dinosaurs like Protoceratops.
- The real Velociraptor found here was roughly the size of a turkey, far smaller than the human-sized animals shown in the Jurassic Park films.
- Andrews's expeditions came to the Gobi chiefly to look for the earliest human ancestors in Asia; they found none, but returned with dinosaurs and fossil mammals instead.
- Bayanzag is the type locality of the Djadochta Formation, whose sandstones record a Cretaceous desert of dunes that geologists have compared with today's Kalahari.
- In the Djadochta beds many animals were buried alive by collapsing or wind-blown sand, and some Protoceratops lie with heads arched upward as if struggling to break free.
- In the late 1960s the Polish palaeontologist Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska described Late Cretaceous eutherian mammals collected at Bayn Dzak.
Why it is worth it
In the low evening sun the sandstone walls of Bayanzag turn red and orange against the grey-green gravel plain of the Gobi, which is how the place earned its English name. The American palaeontologist Roy Chapman Andrews called them the Flaming Cliffs during his visits in the 1920s; Mongolians know the site as Bayanzag, "rich in saxaul", after the hardy desert shrub that grows nearby, or simply as Ulaan Ereg, the red cliffs. The escarpment lies in Ömnögovi Province in the south of Mongolia.
The colour belongs to rocks of the Djadochta Formation, laid down in the Late Cretaceous, roughly in the Campanian age some 75 million years ago. At that time the region was a warm, semi-arid land of wind-blown dunes, and the sediments that now form the cliffs are mostly fine reddish-orange to pale sands and sandstones. Animals buried in these sands were often preserved whole, and the formation has become one of the best-known sources of small Late Cretaceous dinosaurs.
The site's fame dates from the Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History, led by Andrews between 1922 and 1928. On 13 July 1923 the team found fossil eggs here, the first dinosaur eggs to be recognised as such. They were long attributed to Protoceratops, the most common dinosaur in these beds, and the slender theropod found near one nest was named Oviraptor, "egg thief", on the assumption that it had died raiding it. In the 1990s the eggs were shown to belong to Oviraptor-like animals themselves, which had probably been brooding their own clutches. The expeditions also brought to light the first known fossils of Velociraptor and Protoceratops, and later finds from the cliffs include the armoured Pinacosaurus, the birdlike Saurornithoides and early placental mammals. Fossils may not be removed from the area without a permit.
Getting there
The Flaming Cliffs lie about 84 km in a straight line from Dalanzadgad, the capital of Ömnögovi Province. The nearest airport is Dalanzadgad Airport (DLZ), about 78 km away. The final approach is across unpaved desert tracks.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Flaming Cliffs site, with the alternative Mongolian name of Mongolian: Улаан Эрэг, is a region of the Gobi Desert in the Ömnögovi Province of Mongolia, in which important fossil finds have been made. It was given this name by American paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, who visited in the 1920s. The area is most famous for yielding the first discovery of dinosaur eggs. Other finds in the area include specimens of Velociraptor and eutherian mammals. It exposes rocks of the Djadochta Formation. It is illegal to remove fossils from the area without appropriate permits.
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