Roy Chapman Andrews is often called "the real life Indiana Jones."* His life as a paleontologist was filled with adventures in many localities. He even had to deal with bandits in the Gobi Desert!
Andrews was interested in many subjects over his life. In 1908, he was the first person to conduct scientific studies on whales off Vancouver Island on the British Columbian coast in Canada. Andrews photographed, measured, and recorded observations about humpback, fin whales, and blue whales in the area. He also collected the skeleton of a humpback whale for the American Museum that is still there today. He used his observations to write a number of technical papers (including the first technical monograph about right whales), as well as a number of popular articles and books for children and adults. These books included All About Whales and Whale Hunting With Gun and Camera.
Andrews approached his boss, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the American Museum, and proposed an expedition into the Gobi Desert. This would be the first expedition into the Gobi Desert by scientists, and after Andrews and his crew left, it was the last one for many years. Andrews was interested in anthropology (the study of the origin of humans), and he felt that the Gobi Desert was the best place to find fossil evidence of the ancestors of humans.
In 1927, Andrews set out on the first of four expeditions (the last was in 1933) into the Gobi. He was unsuccessful in his mission to find the ancestors of humans, but Andrews brought back many dinosaur skeletons from the Gobi. Many of these were of species that had never been discovered before.
On July 23rd, 1933 Andrews made a discovery that forever changed our modern understanding of dinosaurs. He found the first recognizable dinosaur eggs! (Paleontologist Charles Gilmore from the Smithsonian Museum had actually found a layer of dinosaur eggshells in Montana, an area that is very well known today for its preservation of eggshells, but he thought that the eggshells were actually the shells of freshwater clams. At the time, there was no evidence that dinosaurs laid eggs, and some paleontologists thought that they might have given birth to their young live, the way that mammals do.)
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