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obviously not the primary reason why Brooks had come with us to
Patagonia. However, he had followed us around the site for several
days, and during that time he had developed a clear idea of what we
were looking for. So when he saw the eggs on top of the ridge, he knew
exactly what they were.
Professional photographers often accompany scientific expedi-
tions, and Brooks was not the first photographer accompanying a fos-
sil-collecting expedition to make an important discovery of dinosaur
eggs and nests. Another such incident had happened about seventy
years before in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. During the 1920s and
early 1930s the photographer J. B. Shackelford had documented the
expeditions to Central Asia led by the famous explorer Roy Chapman
Andrews and the paleontologist Walter Granger of the American
Museum of Natural History. Like Brooks, Shackelford became finely
tuned for fossil prospecting, and like Brooks, Shackelford's acute
vision and attention to detail paid great dividends to Andrews and
Granger. Andrews described Shackelford's moment of discovery in his
account of the expedition:
My car was far in advance of the others and I asked Shackelford to
stop the fleet while I ran over to the yurts for a conference with the
inmates. During this time ... he wandered off a few hundred yards to
inspect some peculiar blocks of earth which had attracted his atten-
tion north of the trail. From them he walked a little farther and soon
found that he was standing on the edge of a vast basin, looking down
on a chaos of ravines and gullies cut deep into red sandstone. He
made his way down the steep slope with the thought that he would
spend ten minutes searching for fossils and, if none were found,
return to the trail. Almost as though led by an invisible hand he
walked straight to a small pinnacle of rock on the top of which rested
a white fossil bone. Below it the soft sandstone had weathered away,
leaving it balanced and ready to be picked off.
Shackelford picked the "fruit" and returned to the cars, just as I
arrived. Granger examined the specimen with keen interest. It was a
skull, obviously reptilian, but unlike anything with which he was
familiar. All of us were puzzled. Granger and Gregory named it Proto-
ceratops andrewsi in 1923. Shackelford reported that he had seen
other bones, and it was evident that we must investigate....
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