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Roy Chapman Andrews

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Roy Chapman Andrews
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(born Jan. 26, 1884, Beloit, Wis., U.S. — died March 11, 1960, Carmel, Calif.) U.S. naturalist, explorer, and author. In 1906 he joined the staff of the American Museum of Natural History, where he would spend much of his working life. There he assembled one of the best collections of cetaceans in the world before turning his attention to Asiatic exploration. He led expeditions to the Tibet region, southwestern China, and Burma (1916 – 17); northern China and Outer Mongolia (1919); and Central Asia. Important discoveries included the first known dinosaur eggs, skeleton parts of Baluchitherium (the largest known land mammal), and evidence of prehistoric human life. His many books for the general public include Across Mongolian Plains (1921) and This Amazing Planet (1940).

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Scientist: Roy Chapman Andrews
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Roy Chapman Andrews
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[b. Beloit, Wisconsin, January 26, 1884, d. Carmel, California, March 11, 1960]

Andrews became world famous as a fossil hunter in the 1920s, when he led four expeditions to Mongolia's Gobi Desert. His discoveries included Protoceratops bones and eggs; the first fossils of several dinosaur genera, including Oviraptor and Velociraptor; and evidence that Stone Age people lived in central Asia. Also a leading authority on whales, Andrews spent his entire professional career at the American Museum of Natural History, where he served as director from 1935 until his retirement in 1941.


Biography: Roy Chapman Andrews
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Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960) was an American naturalist, explorer, and author whose popular image was that of a romantic explorer in Asia.

Roy Chapman Andrews was born in Beloit, Wis., on Jan. 26, 1884. Fascinated by the natural wonders of southern Wisconsin, he chose his life's work at an early age. Immediately upon his graduation from Beloit College in 1906, he went to New York to seek employment at the American Museum of Natural History, volunteering to scrub floors when no other positions were available.

He assisted in the taxidermy department of the museum and soon received a field assignment to bring in the skeleton of a whale beached on Long Island. This initiated his scientific investigations of whales, and he was soon established as the world's leading whale authority. In his pursuit of these and other studies, Andrews traveled to Alaska, the East Indies, Japan, and Korea. He identified large "devilfish" off the Korean coast as the California gray whale, then considered an extinct species.

After 1915 Andrews concentrated on land explorations; his initial foray had been into the dense northern forests of Korea, but his dream was to test the theory of Henry Fairfield Osborn that central Asia was the home of primitive man and the source of much of the animal life of Europe and America. This work began in 1916 with a small zoological expedition to the periphery of the central Asian plateau in southwestern China and Burma. After a delay caused by World War I, during which Andrews served in Peking for the naval intelligence service, the youthful explorer returned to the United States to plan and finance his ambitious decade-long project. Andrews presented his project as a new type of exploration, a mammoth cooperative venture of various sciences, utilizing innovative techniques, including automobiles for desert exploration. He got the necessary financial support and set out in 1921.

He repeatedly led teams into the less-known portions of China, Borneo, and central Asia. He gained world fame because of his dramatic expeditions into the Gobi Desert, which led to the discovery of rich fossil fields, new geological strata, the first dinosaur eggs known to science, and skeleton parts of some of the largest and oldest known mammals, including the huge Baluchitherium and the tiny Protoceratops andrewsi. Political turmoil and another war stopped Andrews's Asian exploration in 1930. Two years later, after writing a full report of these expeditions, The New Conquest of Central Asia, he entered museum administration.

Andrews had taken a master's degree from Columbia University in 1913; he received honorary doctorates from Brown University in 1926 and Beloit College in 1928. He served as director of the American Museum of Natural History from 1935 to 1942, then devoted the rest of his life to writing and lecturing. A spellbinding lecturer and storyteller, he relished his popular image as a romantic explorer, but claimed that life was really more dangerous in American cities than in the Gobi Desert. He died in Carmel, Calif., on March 11, 1960.

Further Reading

The best sources on Andrews are his own voluminous writings, particularly his autobiographical works: This Business of Exploring (1935); Under a Lucky Star: A Lifetime of Adventure (1943); An Explorer Comes Home: Further Adventures of Roy Chapman Andrews (1947); and Beyond Adventure: The Lives of Three Explorers (1954). The secondary sources are meager. Fitzhugh Green, Roy Chapman Andrews, Dragon Hunter (1930), is the only biography. Henry Chester Tracy, American Naturists (1930), repeats Andrews's own writings. Geoffrey Hellman, Bankers, Bones and Beetles: The First Century of the American Museum of Natural History (1969), recounts Andrews's association with the museum.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Roy Chapman Andrews
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Andrews, Roy Chapman, 1884-1960, American naturalist and explorer, b. Beloit, Wis., B.A. Beloit College, 1906, M.A. Columbia Univ., 1913. Associated with the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, from 1906, he was its director from 1935 to 1942. Between 1908 and 1914 he made several trips to Alaska, along the coast of Asia, and in Malayan seas to study aquatic mammals. He later conducted (1917-30) several expeditions into central Asia to study both fossil and living plants and animals. In the Gobi desert, he discovered some of the world's great fossil fields, which yielded the remains of many ancient animals (including Baluchitherium, the largest known land mammal), dinosaurs and their eggs, and plants previously unknown to science. Handsome and charismatic, Andrews was something of a celebrity, lecturing and becoming a radio personality. He described his expeditions in several books and discussed them all in The New Conquest of Central Asia (1932). His writings also include Meet Your Ancestors (1945), In the Days of the Dinosaur (1959), and the autobiographical Under a Lucky Star (1943) and An Explorer Comes Home (1947).

Bibliography

See C. Gallenkamp, Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions (2001).

Quotes By: Roy Chapman Andrews
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Quotes:

"Man is an ape with possibilities."

Wikipedia: Roy Chapman Andrews
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Roy Chapman Andrews
For the former professional American football coach see LeRoy Andrews

Roy Chapman Andrews (January 26, 1884 – March 11, 1960) was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He is primarily known for leading a series of expeditions through the fragmented China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia. The expeditions made important discoveries and brought the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs to the museum.

Contents

Early life and education

Andrews was born on January 26, 1884, in Beloit, Wisconsin, at 419 St. Lawrence Avenue. As a child, he explored forests, fields, and waters nearby, developing marksmanship skills. He taught himself taxidermy and used funds from this hobby to pay tuition to Beloit College, where he was a member of Sigma Chi.

On March 31, 1905, during his junior year in College, Andrews was boating on the Rock River in bad conditions when his craft capsized; his friend, Monty White, died in the cold waters, but Andrews survived. After graduation the following year, Andrews used some of his money saved from taxidermy to travel to New York City to find a job at the American Museum of Natural History. Told that there were no openings, Andrews took a job as a janitor in the taxidermy department and began collecting specimens for the museum. During the next few years, he worked and studied simultaneously, earning a Master of Arts degree in mammalogy from Columbia University.

Career

Roy Chapman Andrews, 1913

From 1909 to 1910, Andrews sailed on the USS Albatross to the East Indies, collecting snakes and lizards and observing marine mammals. In 1913, he sailed aboard the schooner Adventuress with owner John Borden to the Arctic. They were hoping to bag a bowhead whale specimen for the American Museum of Natural History. On this expedition, he filmed some of the best footage of seals ever seen, but they never got a whale.

He married Yvette Borup in 1914. From 1916 to 1917, Andrews and his wife led the Asiatic Zoological Expedition of the museum through much of western and southern Yunnan, as well as other provinces of China. The book Camps and Trails in China records their experiences.

In 1920, Andrews began planning for expeditions to Mongolia and drove a fleet of Dodge cars westward from Peking. In 1922, the party discovered a fossil of Indricotherium (then named "Baluchitherium"), a gigantic hornless rhinoceros, which was sent back to the museum, arriving on December 19. In the 1920s, he went to Mongolia, hoping to find out something about the origin of man. He didn't find out anything about man, but he discovered a treasure trove of dinosaur bones. During four expeditions in the Gobi Desert between 1922 and 1925, he discovered Protoceratops, a nest of Protoceratops eggs (later studies revealed them to be Oviraptor eggs), Pinacosaurus, Saurornithoides, Oviraptor and Velociraptor, none of which were known before.

On July 13, 1923, the party was the first in the world to discover dinosaur eggs. Initially thought to belong to the ceratopsian Protoceratops, they were determined in 1995 to actually belong to the theropod Oviraptor [1]. Walter W. Granger discovered a skull from the Cretaceous period. In 1925, the museum sent a letter back informing the party that the skull was that of a mammal, and therefore rare and valuable; more were uncovered. Expeditions in the area stopped during 1926 and 1927. In 1928, the expedition's finds were seized by Chinese authorities but were eventually returned. The 1929 expedition was cancelled. In 1930, he made one final trip and discovered some mastodon fossils. (Sixty years after Andrews' initial expedition, the American Museum of Natural History returned to Mongolia on the invitation of its government to continue exploration.) Later that year, Andrews returned to the United States and divorced his wife, with whom he had two sons.

In 1927, the Boy Scouts of America made Andrews an Honorary Scout, a new category of Scout created that same year. This distinction was given to "American citizens whose achievements in outdoor activity, exploration and worthwhile adventure are of such an exceptional character as to capture the imagination of boys...". [1]

Andrews joined The Explorers Club in New York in 1908, four years after its founding. He later served as its President from 1931 to 1934. In 1934, Andrews became the director of the museum. In his 1935 book The Business of Exploring, he wrote "I was born to be an explorer...There was never any decision to make. I couldn't do anything else and be happy." In 1942, Andrews retired to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, where he wrote about his life and died in 1960. He is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in his hometown of Beloit.

Douglas Preston of the American Museum of Natural History wrote:

Andrews is allegedly the real person that the movie character of Indiana Jones was patterned after. Andrews was an accomplished stage master. He created an image and lived it out impeccably—there was no chink in his armor. Roy Chapman Andrews: famous explorer, dinosaur hunter, exemplar of Anglo-Saxon virtues, crack shot, fighter of Mongolian brigands, the man who created the metaphor of 'Outer Mongolia' as denoting any exceedingly remote place.[2]

Although many sources claim that Andrews was the inspiration for Indiana Jones, neither George Lucas nor the other creators of the films have ever confirmed this. The 120-page transcript of the story conferences for the movie does not mention Andrews. [3] An analysis by the Smithsonian Channel concludes that the linkage was indirect, with Andrews (and other explorers) serving as the model for heroes in adventure films of the 1940s and 1950s, who in turn inspired Lucas and his fellow writers. [4]

Bibliography

Books listed on Worldcat [5]

Search Wikiquote Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Roy Chapman Andrews
  • Monographs of the Pacific Cetacea (1914–16)
  • Whale Hunting With Gun and Camera (1916)
  • Camps and Trails in China (1918)
  • Across Mongolian Plains (1921)
  • On The Trail of Ancient Man (1926)
  • Ends of the Earth (1929)
  • The New Conquest of Central Asia (1932)
  • This Business of Exploring (1935)
  • Exploring with Andrews (1938)
  • This Amazing Planet (1939)
  • Under a Lucky Star (1943)
  • Meet your Ancestors, A Biography of Primitive Man (1945)
  • An Explorer Comes Home (1947)
  • My Favorite Stories of the Great Outdoors Editor (1950)
  • Quest in the Desert (1950)
  • Heart of Asia: True Tales of the Far East (1951)
  • Nature's Way: How Nature Takes Care of Her Own (1951)
  • All About Dinosaurs (1953)
  • All About Whales (1954)
  • Beyond Adventure: The Lives of Three Explorers (1954)
  • Quest of the Snow Leopard (1955)
  • All About Strange Beasts of the Past (1956)
  • In the Days of the Dinosaurs (1959)

Notes

  1. ^ "Around the World". Time (magazine). August 29 1927. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,723029,00.html. Retrieved 2007-10-24. 
  2. ^ Preston, Douglas J. (1993). Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion Into the American Museum of Natural History. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-10456-1. , pp. 97-98
  3. ^ http://www.sendspace.com/file/cnoe3r
  4. ^ http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/site/smithsonian/show_crystal_skull_real.do
  5. ^ Results for 'Roy Chapman Andrews' [WorldCat.org]

References

External links

Awards and achievements
Preceded by
John W. Weeks		 Cover of Time Magazine
29 October 1923		 Succeeded by
Giulio Gatti-Casazza

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Scientist. History of Science and Technology, edited by Bryan Bunch and Alexander Hellemans. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
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Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Roy Chapman Andrews".  Read more