Rocky Road: Roy Chapman Andrews

Roy Chapman Andrews

From Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas J. Preston

Roy Chapman Andrews titled his autobiography Under a Lucky Star, and luck certainly played an important part in his life. Upon graduating from college, the man credited with inspiring the Indiana Jones character caught a train to New York and talked his way into a post at the American Museum of Natural History, even though no job was available. Andrews volunteered to scrub floors if necessary. When his prospective boss voiced doubt over whether a college graduate would be content scrubbing floors, Andrews reminded him that he wouldn't scrub anyone's floors, just the museum's. He was hired.

Early on, a grisly museum assignment salvaging a whale carcass fired Andrews's interest in cetaceans, and he traveled to the Pacific Northwest and later the Orient to study them. But cetaceans would not remain his lifelong passion, nor would his other mammalian studies. Andrews was first and foremost an explorer, and nothing else satisfied him so well.

In 1920, Andrews did lunch with his boss, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and proposed the American Museum of Natural History's most ambitious project: an exploration of the Gobi Desert. Already a seasoned world traveler, Andrews set up housekeeping in Peking with his family, and made his first expedition into the Gobi in 1922. Expeditions followed in 1923, 1925, 1928 and 1930. Expecting to find the "missing link" for human evolution, Andrews instead found a wealth of mammal and dinosaur fossils. (He concluded, however, that prehistoric people living in the Gobi — "Dune Dwellers of the Shabarakh Usu" — had also collected fossils, namely dinosaur eggs.) Dinosaur eggs were the fossils that garnered the most publicity, and Andrews raised funds for future expeditions through a dinosaur egg auction. The auction proved unwise in the long run, leading to suspicions in Asia that his motivation was not truly scientific but monetary, and he found negotiations for subsequent expeditions more difficult.

Living in a politically unstable China was dangerous, as was traveling through the punishing climate of the Gobi. Armed bandits were a fact of life, and warring factions in Mongolia and China treated each other — and outsiders — with a casual brutality. More than once, Andrews narrowly escaped death. Temperatures soared as high as 145°F, alternating with frigid nights, howling blizzards and smothering sandstorms. Andrews's party once killed 47 venomous snakes in a single night when the vipers took refuge from the cold in their tents. Perhaps worst of all, Andrews's fieldwork and fundraising trips kept him away from his family for months at a time. His first marriage eventually soured, and his estranged wife moved to England with their two sons.

The fieldwork wasn't pure torture, however. A Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin got to travel with one AMNH expedition, and later marveled at the relative luxury of warm sleeping bags, and jeeps, trucks and camels to haul the gear. When meat ran low, Teilhard recalled that Andrews went off gazelle hunting to feed his crew.

From Illustrations from All About Dinosaurs by Roy Chapman Andrews, drawn by Thomas W. Voter

From All About Dinosaurs by Roy Chapman Andrews, drawn by Thomas W. Voter

Pushing cars over rough terrain, toting guns to scare away bandits, and lending his impressive profile for a number of photographs, Andrews (intentionally or unintentionally) built his own celebrity status as surely as he beefed up the museum's collections. After he returned to America, the museum asked Andrews to take over as museum director. Once he accepted, however, his famous luck ran out; the Great Depression left the museum badly strapped for funds, and his personality didn't lend itself to museum administration. Under enormous pressure, Andrews eventually resigned from the director post. He consoled himself with a pleasant retirement and a happy second marriage, and devoted himself to bringing his expeditions and prehistoric creatures to life.

Despite his famous dinosaur finds, Andrews insisted that his first interest was paleoanthropology. In 1945, he published Meet Your Ancestors, aimed at a general audience. The good thing about the book was that it neatly captured what most anthropologists believed about early humans. The embarrassing thing about the book was that it neatly captured what most anthropologists believed about early humans in the mid-1940s. Andrews's book mixed sound scientific observations with notions that couldn't withstand later scientific scrutiny or, say, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

If I plant radishes on my farm near the forest where the earth is moist and rich, they grow fast and big. A few hundred yards away, across the road, the soil is dry and thin and those from the same seed take twice as long to mature. . . . So it was with our ancestral seeds. Some of them never did make progress, for one reason or another. They became only half-human before their line died out. Others had better luck and eventually reached a human status. But even after the goal was attained by slow and halting steps and they became men of our own species, Homo sapiens, the progress of the different races was unequal. Some developed into masters of the world at incredible speed. But the Tasmanians who became extinct about 1870 and the existing Australian aborigines lagged far behind. Even though we are using submarines, airplanes, and radios, the primitive Australians are still living in the Stone Age, not much advanced beyond the stage of Neanderthal Man.

Andrews described Cro-Magnons in the chapter titled "The Wise Man Appears" and speculated that rouge and hairdos mattered as much to Cro-Magnon women "as to our own wives and sisters."

In 1953, Andrews published a children's book All About Dinosaurs. In it, he recounted his team's reaction to its first fossil find in Mongolia: "We were so excited that we laughed and shouted and shook hands. We pounded each other on the back and did all the things men do when they are very happy." He gave glowing descriptions of many beasts, but for others he had little praise. About Brontosaurus (Apatosaurus) he wrote, "The small brain weighed less than a pound. It shows that the creature was just about as stupid as an animal could be and still live."

When Andrews and the American Museum of Natural History halted expeditions to Mongolia in the early 1930s, probably no one realized how much time would pass before the museum could return. For the next 60 years, the Mongolia's fossil finds were reserved for Eastern Bloc scientists, including Russia and Poland. In 1990, however, Mongolia invited the American Museum of Natural History to return, which it did with enthusiasm.

For more information:
Dragon Hunter by Charles Gallenkamp
Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas J. Preston
Meet Your Ancestors by Roy Chapman Andrews
All About Dinosaurs by Roy Chapman Andrews
Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs by Michael Novacek
Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos
The Jesuit and the Skull by Amir Aczel