Mark Norell

In addition to fieldwork in the Patagonia, the Chilean Andes, the Carpathian mountains of Romania, and the Sahara, for the last 26 years Mark Norell has been one of the team leaders of the joint American Museum of Natural History/Mongolian Academy of Sciences expeditions to the Gobi Desert. There, in 1993, the team discovered Ukhaa Tolgod, one of the world’s richest fossil sites, which yielded the first embryo of a meat-eating dinosaur, the primitive theropod dinosaurs Shuvuuia, Tsaagan, Citipati, and Khaan, and Citipati specimens sitting on top of their eggs in a brooding position. With the discovery of these and other fossils, Dr. Norell and the team have generated new ideas about bird origins and the groups of dinosaurs to which modern birds are most closely related. Dr. Norell was also part of the team that announced the discovery of two 120-million-year-old dinosaur species that show unequivocal evidence of true feathers.