2011 Inner Mongolia field season begins

3 August 2011. IVPP, Beijing, China.

With the arrival of team members Xiaoming and Mike, the 2011 field expedition to Inner Mongolia is in full swing.

The team this year comprises three of us from Los Angeles, and four from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. We will also have a few geolgists joining us from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Earth Sciences research division.

The tentative schedule is to depart for Xilinhot on Friday, August 5. Some of the sites we will visit include the earl-middle Miocene Aoerban area, the middle Miocene Tunggur Formation, and the late Miocene Baogeda Ula Formation.

The stuffy and warm air in Beijing urges us to again migrate northward onto the Mongolian Plateau where the skies are blue and the grasses are green.

~Jack