Gobi Flag

The “Gobi Flag” is an artifact of the Museum’s 1920s expedition to the Gobi Desert. The expedition leader was Roy Chapman Andrews (1884 – 1960), who was an American explorer, adventurer, and naturalist who later became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. The expedition made significant discoveries and brought the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs to the museum.

This flag was placed on one of the first trucks ever to cross the Gobi desert in the 1920s. Its tattered condition is the result of the fierce sandstorms that the expedition had to face. The team also used camels to carry fuel and equipment for the scientists and assistants. The journey found no human fossils, but they discovered numerous fossils of reptiles and mammals dating back to the time of the dinosaurs.

The Gobi Desert is a vast desert region that covers parts of northern and northwestern China and southern Mongolia. Archaeologists and paleontologists excavations in the Nemegt Basin in Mongolia, have over the years unearthed fossil treasures, including early mammals, dinosaur eggs, and prehistoric stone implements, some 100,000 years old.

Andrews’s writings about his adventures Gobi Desert and Mongolia plus his exploits made him famous. Andrews and other explorers from the period served as the model for the academic adventurer heroes in adventure films of the 1940s and 1950s, who, in turn, inspired the movie character of Indiana Jones.