Discoveries in the Gobi Desert by the American Museum Expeditions¹

Abstract

IN 1799, William Smith, then a young man of thirty, who was born at Churchill in Oxfordshire, dictated his now classic document, “The Order of the Strata,” including a map showing the successive and characteristic fossils of southern- Britain and the Oxford clay underlying this great University, with its Jurassic deinosaur Cetiosaurus. In the century and a quarter which has intervened before the present meeting of the British Association in Oxford, the twin sciences of geology and palaeontology have reached a degree of precision which enables us, after our relatively brief and intensive surveys of the past four years, to declare ‘the order of the strata’ of Mongolia. Included in the Gobi Desert is a stratum equivalent in age to the Oxford clay of William Smith, containing the giant sauropod Asiatosaurus, a first cousin of the Oxford Cetiosaurus.