Roy Chapman Andrews

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Roy Chapman Andrews (January 26, 1884–March 11, 1960) was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History, primarily known for leading a series of expeditions through the fragmented China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia. The expeditions made important discoveries and brought the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs in the world to the museum. Many of Andrews's encounters and narrow escapes from death have been reported, including incidents with whales, sharks, pythons, and armed Chinese bandits. He was erroneously reported dead at least once.

Douglas Preston of the American Museum of Natural History wrote:

Andrews is allegedly the real person that the movie character of Indiana Jones was patterned after. Andrews was an accomplished stage master. He created an image and lived it out impeccably—there was no chink in his armor. Roy Chapman Andrews: famous explorer, dinosaur hunter, exemplar of Anglo-Saxon virtues, crack shot, fighter of Mongolian brigands, the man who created the metaphor of 'Outer Mongolia' as denoting any exceedingly remote place.<ref>{[cite book|title=Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion Into the American Museum of Natural History|first=Douglas J.|last=Preston|publisher=St. Martin's Press|year=1993|id=ISBN 0-312-10456-1}}, pp. 97-8, "Andrews is allegedly the real person that the movie character of Indiana Jones was patterned after... crack shot, fighter of Mongolian brigands, the man who created the metaphor of 'Outer Mongolia' as denoting any exceedingly remote place."</ref>

1 Early life and education
2 Career
3 Sources
4 Books

[edit] Early life and education

Andrews was born on January 26, 1884, in Beloit, Wisconsin, at 419 St. Lawrence Avenue. As a child, he explored forests, fields, and waters nearby, developing marksmanship skills. He taught himself taxidermy and used funds from this hobby to pay tuition to Beloit College, where he was a member of Sigma Chi.

On March 31, 1905, during his junior year in College, Andrews was boating on the Rock River in bad conditions when his craft capsized; his friend, Monty White, died in the cold waters, but Andrews survived. After graduation the following year, Andrews used some of his money saved from taxidermy to travel to New York City to find a job at the American Museum of Natural History. Told that there were no openings, Andrews took a job as a janitor in the taxidermy department and began collecting specimens for the museum. During the next few years, he worked and studied simultaneously, earning a Master of Arts degree in mammalogy from Columbia University.

[edit] Career

From 1909 to 1910, Andrews sailed on the USS Albatross to the East Indies, collecting snakes and lizards and observing marine mammals. He married Yvette Borup in 1914. From 1916 to 1917, Andrews and his wife led the Asiatic Zoological Expedition of the museum through much of western and southern Yunnan, as well as other provinces of China. The book Camps and Trails in China records their experiences.

In 1920, Andrews began planning for expeditions to Mongolia and drove a fleet of Dodge cars westward from Peking. In 1922, the party discovered a fossil of Indricotherium (then named "Baluchitherium"), a gigantic hornless rhinoceros, which was sent back to the museum, arriving on December 19.

On July 13, 1923, the party was the first in the world to discover dinosaur eggs. Initially thought to belong to the ceratopsian Protoceratops, they were determined in 1995 to actually belong to the theropod Oviraptor [1]. Walter Granger discovered a skull from the Cretaceous period. In 1925, the museum sent a letter back informing the party that the skull was that of a mammal, and therefore rare and valuable; more were uncovered. Expeditions in the area stopped during 1926 and 1927. In 1928, the expedition's finds were seized by Chinese authorities but were eventually returned. The 1929 expedition was cancelled. In 1930, he made one final trip and discovered some mastodon fossils. (Sixty years after Chapman's initial expedition, the American Museum of Natural History returned to Mongolia on the invitation of its government to continue exploration.) Later that year, Champan returned to the United States and divorced his wife, with whom he had two sons.

In 1934, Andrews became the director of the museum. In his 1935 book The Business of Exploring, he wrote "I was born to be an explorer...There was never any decision to make. I couldn't do anything else and be happy." In 1942, Andrews retired to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, where he wrote about his life and died in 1960. He is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in his hometown of Beloit.