- 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, 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. in the world to the museum. Many of Andrews's encounters and narrow escapes from death have been
reported, including incidents with whales, sharks, pythons, and armed Chinese bandits. He was erroneously reported dead at least
once.
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.[1]
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
From 1909 to 1910, Andrews sailed on the USS Albatross to the
East Indies, collecting snakes and lizards and observing marine
mammals. 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.
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.
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.
Books
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-
-
-
- see WP:CITE
- Monographs of the Pacific Cetacea (1914-16)
- Whale Hunting With Gun and Camera (1916)
- Camps and Trails in China (1918)
- Across Mongolian Plains (1920)
- 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 (c1940)
- Under a Lucky Star, A Lifetime of Adventure by Roy Chapman Andrews (1943)[2]
- Meet your Ancestors, A Biography of Primitive Man (1945)
- An Explorer Comes Home: Further Adventures of Roy Chapman Andrews (1947)
- My Favorite Stories of the Great Outdoors (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)
References
- ^ 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
- ^ Discover
Sources
External links
*Photographs of Roy C. Andrews
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