The Tibetan Plateau and the formidable Himalayan mountains to the south are known as the “Roof of the World,” with towering peaks and expansive high-altitude plains. Explorations over the past century, either for scientific or for personal, spiritual or nationalistic purposes, are immortalized in books, documentaries and urban myths. My team’s expeditions to Tibet began without much fanfare. Our goal was simple: to systematically document the fossils present in the remote western reaches explored previously by geologists but not vertebrate paleontologists.
Since 2006 we have focused our efforts in a stretch of badlands in the Zanda Basin. Zanda’s badlands cover an area larger than Yellowstone National Park and are transected by a river called the Langqen Zangbo, which flows westward into India. A group of us makes the pilgrimage yearly from Los Angeles to Beijing, where we set off in field vehicles on the seven-day cross-country trip to western Tibet. The final descent from the plateau into the basin is a sight to behold no matter how many times I return here for field work: With the permanently snowy peaks of the Himalayas as the backdrop, our vehicles snake through barren cliffs that take us backward through time as we pass deeper and deeper rock layers. Reminders of the perils of the expedition can be seen at the bottom of the cliffs, where fallen and crushed cars remain year after year. We finally reach the level of the Langqen Zangbo, where the small town of Zanda sits on a terrace overlooking the majestic river valley.
August 2010 started as a typical field season, except that it was the first time since our wedding that my wife, Juan, and I were on an expedition together. (We met while doing fieldwork in the northern Tibetan Plateau in 2005.) I was a graduate student at the University of Southern California and she at the University of Alberta. Our drivers skillfully navigated the intricate valleys on dirt trails to bring us close to rock exposures that looked promising from our satellite maps. We parked the vehicles just off the trail and split into small groups to search for fossil remains of extinct mammals and other animals.
We stopped as disbelief sank in: This looked like the top of a cat skull.