The Gobi Desert - Expedition journal page 5

Twelve days of intensive field work yield enough material for our research. We have to take leave of the helpful Mongolian family and thank them with Belgian chocolate. We actually obtained that much residue that we cannot simply send it to Belgium. We decide to spend our last days in Erenhot sorting out tens of kilos of the 2 mm residue.

This brings us many fragments of small mammal jaws and bones.

We will only send the 0.5 mm residue to the Museum of Natural Sciences, where it will be sorted under a microscope. On our way back to Hohhot we pass by the Irdin Manha fossil site. This was made famous in the 1930s, when palaeontologists of the American Museum of Natural History (New York) discovered exceptional specimens of large brontotheres (perissodactyls closely related to the rhinoceros). We need only a few minutes to find a fragment of a small fossil tapir's mandible. We take GPS coordinates, as we did on all other sites, to provide an exact mapping of all our discoveries.