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The dinosaur eggs eventually caused Dr. Andrews much vexation. George Olsen, paleontologist, discovered the first fragments. Dr. Andrews & companions "did not take his story very seriously. . . . The prospect was thrilling, but we would not let ourselves think of it too seriously. . . ." Dr. Walter Granger, paleontologist, finally said: "No dinosaur eggs have ever been found, but the reptiles probably did lay eggs. These must be dinosaur eggs. They can't be anything else."
To raise money for the digging Dr. Andrews and Dr. Osborn at a breakfast in Manhattan decided to excite the public by selling a dinosaur egg to the highest bidder. Offers came from all parts of the world, including Australia and New Zealand. The Illustrated London News bid, as did the National Geographic Society. The late Colonel Austin Colgate bought the egg for $5,000. Colgate University now has it. Dr. Andrews followed up the publicity, in four months raised $286,000 for his field work.
The Colgate dinosaur egg was the only one sold. The British Museum, to which the American Museum of Natural History had sent a plaster replica of an egg gratis, refused to pay $100 for an original aged 95 million years. But in the Orient, Chinese, Mongols & Russians decided that Dr. Andrews was getting $60,000 a dozen for the eggs, and a fortune for the big bones. When he returned to Mongolia he found grafters plaguing him at every turn. He generally bullied them out of their demands.
The civil wars which hung over Peking and the route to the Gobi, impeded him more than the extortionists. During one air raid he saved his life only by hiding under a freight car. A shell fragment struck within two inches of his face. He burnt his fingers pulling the red-hot steel from the ground. En route to & from the desert bandits occasionally shot at the diggers. But there were no casualties. The late J. McKenzie Young, who had charge of the motor cars, was once attacked while driving alone. He routed the assailants by guiding his car with one hand, firing his rifle pistol-wise with the other. During the ten years' work only two serious accidents occurred in the field. First was Dr. Andrews' shooting himself in the thigh. The other accident was a man's cutting a leg artery. At the very beginning of the work Dr. Andrews' eyes became infected. Thenceforth he has been obliged to wear glasses.
Hardbitten as Dr. Andrews is, the Gobi fascinates him. Occasionally it makes him poetize. Writes he toward the end of his narrative: "Wandering over the brick-red sediments all of us eventually arrived at an isolated cone-shaped butte. From its low summit we looked down upon a relief map of rounded hillocks, tiny flat plains and miniature ravines. Almost every inch was covered with animal footprints. . . .
"For an hour I wandered over the badlands, reading the story of life and death in the desert. Sixty million years ago, when these red sediments were being deposited, the drama was the same but with different actors. Then rhinoceroses trod this ground, the gigantic Andrewsarchus, greatest of all known flesh-eating land mammals, prowled at night, and fed upon the bodies of dying titanotheres. It was a world of nightmare creatures. The high plateaus of Africa today with their open plains and sparse forests offer a convincing parallel to ancient Mongolia.