Few places in the world pack in as much scientific excitement as Bayanzag, the Gobi's Flaming Cliffs. At first glance they are walls of red clay and sandstone, carved by erosion into ravines, towers and amphitheatres, which at sunset blaze orange and scarlet above the steppe. But what makes this spot a place of pilgrimage isn't just its beauty: it's that here, in 1922 and 1923, a group of American explorers unearthed the first known fossilised dinosaur egg nests, and in doing so changed forever what we knew about these animals.
The man who gave the place its name, Roy Chapman Andrews, was a real-life adventurer: he led the famous Central Asiatic Expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History, crossed the Gobi by car and with camel caravans, and for many people was one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones. At these cliffs, his team found not only the eggs but complete skeletons of dinosaurs unknown at the time, such as Protoceratops and Velociraptor, animals that are now stars of museums and films. Walking around Bayanzag means standing on the ground where much of modern dinosaur palaeontology was born.
This guide tells you exactly what to see at Bayanzag, why it's worth arriving at sunset, what was discovered here and where to see those fossils today, how the site fits into a Gobi circuit and what you need to know before you come: from the ban on taking fossils to the lack of ATMs and phone signal. Bayanzag doesn't take long to explore, but it leaves a deep impression: that of being in the exact spot where, a century ago, the desert gave up some of its most astonishing secrets.
Bayanzag entered world history in the summer of 1922, when the Third Central Asiatic Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History, led by the palaeontologist and adventurer Roy Chapman Andrews, came across these red cliffs by chance while searching for fossils of early humans. It was Andrews who named them the 'Flaming Cliffs' for their colour at sunset. In 1923, his team made the find that would make headlines around the world: the first known fossilised dinosaur egg nests, which for decades were attributed to Protoceratops and which in 1995 were shown to actually belong to Oviraptor. Alongside the eggs, more than a hundred skeletons turned up, including the first remains of Protoceratops and Velociraptor, species that are now famous. Andrews' expeditions, between 1922 and 1925, made the Gobi one of the great dinosaur sites on the planet, a status it still holds: fossils are still being found in the region today. Our history page tells the full story of those expeditions, the discoveries they made, and the looting and protection of Mongolian fossils.
Read the full history ↓The great desert of the south, and much more than dunes: steppe, mountains and icy canyons, dinosaur graveyards and the singing dunes of Khongoryn Els, explored by 4x4 and on the back of a Bactrian camel from the town of Dalanzadgad.
Read the history of The Gobi (south) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The modern history of Bayanzag begins with a character who seems straight out of a film: Roy Chapman Andrews, an American naturalist, explorer and adventurer, born in 1884, who went on to direct the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Hunter, diver, writer and showman, Andrews cultivated his own legend — wide-brimmed hat and revolver on his belt — to the point that many consider him one of the inspirations for the character of Indiana Jones. In the 1920s he dreamed up a colossal scientific project: crossing the Gobi Desert in search of the origin of humankind, which some scientists at the time placed in Central Asia.
To do so he organised the museum's famous Central Asiatic Expeditions, which between 1922 and 1930 travelled across the Gobi with a combination that was astonishing for the time: a fleet of Dodge cars that forged a path along non-existent tracks and a long caravan of Bactrian camels carrying the fuel, water and supplies. It was a hugely expensive and dangerous venture, in a country just emerging from centuries of foreign rule and in the middle of political upheaval, with sandstorms, bandits, snakes and an extreme climate. Andrews never found the human ancestor he was looking for, but he found something he could never have imagined: one of the greatest palaeontological treasures on the planet.
In the summer of 1922, almost by chance, the expedition reached a stretch of red sandstone cliffs in the southern Gobi. Seeing them blaze in the evening light, Andrews named them 'Flaming Cliffs'. The Mongolian name for the place was Bayanzag, 'rich in saxaul'. In the red clay of those walls, the team began finding bones everywhere. The best was yet to come.
The discovery that made headlines around the world came in the summer of 1923. In the cliffs of Bayanzag, members of the expedition — with palaeontologist Walter Granger as chief scientist — unearthed something never seen before: nests of fossilised dinosaur eggs, the first ever recognised as such. Until then it had been assumed that dinosaurs laid eggs, like reptiles and birds, but nobody had such clear and spectacular proof: there were the clutches, with the elongated eggs arranged in a circle, turned to stone for tens of millions of years in the Cretaceous clay.
The news caused a worldwide sensation and helped fund the following expeditions; it is said that an egg was even auctioned to raise money. For more than seventy years those eggs were believed to belong to Protoceratops, a sheep-sized plant-eating dinosaur with a bony frill, whose skeletons turned up by the hundreds in the area. Near one of the nests, the skeleton of a different dinosaur was also found: a theropod that, presumed to be a thief of other animals' eggs, was given the name Oviraptor ('egg thief').
The irony took decades to resolve. In 1993 and 1995, new expeditions to the Gobi found identical eggs, but this time with embryos inside — and the embryos were Oviraptor, not Protoceratops. In other words, the supposed 'egg thief' was not raiding someone else's nest but brooding its own, sitting on the clutch like a bird. Oviraptor went from villain to model parent, and the episode became a classic example of how science corrects its own mistakes with new evidence. It had all started in the red clay of Bayanzag.
The eggs were only the beginning. Andrews's expeditions brought out of the Gobi, and particularly out of Bayanzag and other nearby sites, an extraordinary quantity of fossils that completely transformed what was known about Asian dinosaurs. Between 1922 and 1925, the teams collected more than a hundred Protoceratops skeletons — adults, juveniles and hatchlings, which made it possible for the first time to study how a dinosaur species grew — and described new genera that are world-famous today.
The most famous is undoubtedly Velociraptor, whose first remains were found here in 1923. That agile, feathered predator, much smaller in reality than in the films, would decades later become a movie star thanks to Jurassic Park, although the real animal stood less than a metre tall and was covered in feathers. These deposits also produced one of the most astonishing fossils ever found, albeit at a nearby site: a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops locked in combat, buried together in an instant, probably by a collapsing dune, and fossilised mid-fight. It is a snapshot of a moment some 75 million years ago.
All this richness comes down to the local geology. The red clay and sandstone of Bayanzag belong to the so-called Djadokhta Formation, from the Late Cretaceous, laid down in an ancient desert of dunes where sandstorms buried animals suddenly and preserved them remarkably well. That is why the Gobi is one of the best places in the world to find dinosaurs, and why, a century after Andrews, erosion still brings new fossils to light every season. Walking through Bayanzag means stepping onto a site that is still very much alive.
The palaeontological fame of Bayanzag and the Gobi also had a dark side. The wealth of fossils made Mongolia a target for looting: for decades, poachers and smugglers illegally dug out bones, eggs and skeletons to sell on the international collectors' market, where a skull or a clutch of eggs can fetch enormous sums. The most notorious case broke in 2012, when an almost complete skeleton of Tarbosaurus bataar — an Asian relative of Tyrannosaurus, found only in the Gobi — was auctioned in New York for more than a million dollars. The Mongolian government protested, it was proven that the skeleton had been smuggled out of the country, and the fossil was eventually repatriated, a case that set a precedent.
Mongolia considers fossils an inalienable national heritage, and their collection, trade and export by private individuals are strictly prohibited by law. So in Bayanzag the rule for travellers is clear-cut: you can look and take photos, but never pick up or buy fossils, however small; taking them out of the country is a serious crime. Many repatriated pieces, or ones found in legal excavations, are now on display in Ulaanbaatar, above all at the Central Museum of Mongolian Dinosaurs, which has turned the defence of palaeontological heritage into a national and educational cause.
At the same time, the site was protected within Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park, one of the largest in the country, which safeguards both the fossil beds and the fragile desert ecosystem. Today Bayanzag is both a sanctuary of science and a tourist destination: every evening the cliffs glow red for travellers arriving by 4x4, in the very place where, a century ago, an adventurer in a wide-brimmed hat dug up the first dinosaur eggs and forever changed the way we picture the Earth's distant past. The legacy of Roy Chapman Andrews still burns in the clay of the Gobi.
