Jack Tseng, a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, has been blogging from the field during a fossil-finding expedition in Inner Mongolia. In his final Fieldwork Journal, Jack talks about the friends and foes one encounters while looking for fossils.
On fossil smugglers:
"Gobi fossils have become attractive to smugglers, and there has recently been a rise in black-market trade in these scientifically valuable finds. During one of our own expeditions, we left a large plaster-covered block containing late Miocene mammal fossils at the site of discovery for a later time, because it was too large to move with our available equipment. When we returned several months later to retrieve the block, we found that it had been hacked into pieces, with large portions missing."