Roy Chapman Andrews

Roy Chapman Andrews was an American explorer, naturalist and paleontologist who led a series of expeditions into the Gobi Desert of Mongolia known as the Central Asiatic Expeditions, carried out between 1922 and 1928 under difficult and politically unstable conditions. On July 13, 1923, members of Andrews's expedition became the first in the world to discover fossilized dinosaur eggs, a find initially attributed to the dinosaur Protoceratops though later determined in 1995 to belong instead to the theropod dinosaur Oviraptor. The same expeditions also recovered numerous dinosaur bones, fossil mammal remains, and in 1922 the skeleton of Paraceratherium, at the time known as Baluchitherium, among the largest land mammals ever to have lived. Andrews became director of the American Museum of Natural History in 1934, and his popular writings about his Central Asian expeditions brought international public attention to paleontological fieldwork and are often cited as an inspiration for later fictional adventurer-explorer characters.