Art & Design|A New York Museum Honors Its Real-Life ‘Indiana Jones’ Dinosaur Hunters

This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are commemorating the past as they move into the future.

They went searching for human ancestors but instead came upon an abundance of dinosaur, mammal and reptile fossils. So they kept going back.

Those expeditions in the vast and remote Gobi Desert of Mongolia led to some of the biggest discoveries in paleontology. And now, more than a century later, the American Museum of Natural History in New York has a new exhibition to honor its intrepid explorers, whose work in the region uncovered species, as well as important clues to the relationship between dinosaurs and birds.

The early expeditions, led by the legendary fossil hunter Roy Chapman Andrews (1884 to 1960), turned up new species of fossil dinosaurs and mammals, including the largest land mammal ever found, Paraceratherium, a hornless ancestor of the rhinoceros that could grow 16 feet tall and weigh 15 to 20 tons.

Even bigger was news of Andrews’ discovery of dinosaur eggs in 1923.

Andrews’s successor, in spirit if not in fact, was Mark A. Norell, who was the curator in charge of fossil amphibians, reptiles and birds in the natural history museum’s division of paleontology and the scientist credited with affirming the link between dinosaurs and birds. He and Michael Novacek, then the museum’s provost of science, led dozens of expeditions to the Gobi since 1990. (Novacek is now the curator of the museum’s paleontology division.)