The hunt for a 50-million-year-old skeleton

The Gobi desert is hot. Too hot. Batu, our guide, is wearing a coat and gloves. He gestures to a rock formation on the horizon. Nick Cage dinosaur, he says, enthusiastically. James looks at me and shrugs. We’ve no way of knowing if it’s the real dig site or not, and in the heat and dust, I’ve kind of forgotten why we care.

© Carla Nizzola

I’m beginning to accept that we might never see our dinosaur again

– Carla Nizzola

Forty eight hours earlier it had seemed essential that we visit Mongolia and find the precise location where the Tyrannosaurus skull was discovered that was later smuggled out of the country, and subsequently sold to the movie star Nicolas Cage for $276,000. Americans, Batu sighs, they love to steal dinosaurs.

We’re in Mongolia looking for clues in the hunt for our own dinosaur, which has gone missing. We acquired the 50-million-year-old Thesceloraurus skeleton two years earlier at the Tuscon…