Cows to the left of me, horses to the right

 Stuck in the middle with you. The caravan is off. We left the hostel at 8 am, picked up a few last minute things and hit the road in apparently record time for one of these expeditions. It took forever getting out of UB, but once we did, the countryside is beautiful. Rolling hills

and barren of trees. Horses and cattle and sheep and goats roaming in herds everywhere. Unfortunately the sides of the highway are littered with plastic trash.It’s such a beautiful country, but humans have taken a terrible toll on the planet everywhere with our overconsumption and production of garbage. Mongolia is no exception. 

Down down down south we went until we got to a small town and decided to grab dinner so that we could camp without having to deal with food for the night. All over the countryside there are trucks hauling pod houses for tourist camps. Great big flat bed trailers carry these white rectangular space-age pre fab structures with polarized plexiglass on either end and a door in the middle. They’re Chinese made, hauled into UB by train, and then distributed eveywhere. 

That’s not where we stayed. We wandered off the main road near this small town, past a ravine used informally as a dump, past the actual dump that was smoldering with burning plastic, and off to a hillside to pitch our tents. Now that I am settled on a grassy plain along a lake surrounded by desert flowers, I am certain there were better options than the subtle aroma of decaying livestock hauled to the dump to return to the earth faster than the tons of plastic. But it was a place to lay in rest in my tiny solo coffin tent, which I love dearly.

Today we made it to Dalanzagdad, the capital city of the Omnogovi province, and we passed a truckload of camels along the way. By ‘truckload’, I mean both a figurative truckloack, because there are over 300,000 camels around here, but also a literal truckload. A truck was parked along the side of the road with at least 60 camels sitting peacefully in the trailer. Sitting. It was astonishing to see their little bulbous noses and thick eyelashes peeking over the edge of the trailer. They make a soft chittering noise like baby geese that I certainly wasn’t expecting. 

They were stopped because of an asshole camel that somehow got out of the truck and was tucked in on the side of road like he couldn’t be bothered to cooperate. The driver at one point shoved him, and he screamed in disdain at the insult. They were waiting for a crane to come to lift this one errant camel back into the trailer so that they could be on their way to the races. Literally. We weren’t able to stay long enough to see the camel lifting, but I presume there was more screaming at the affront.

We made it into DZ to get the local permit, and then suddenly realized that it’s Saturday and the offices are closed. A few well-placed phone called, because apparently that’s how it works, and Bob’s your uncle. Off we go to the first collection site, after another road side sleep. By tomorrow night, there should be jerboas.

UB traffic

 Ulaanbataar has grown exponentially over the last decade. Apartment towers sprout up everywhere, 15+ stories tall, and the traffic is epic. It can take nearly an hour to cover a mile.

Mid day yesterday, we learned that the person who needed to sign our collection permits is himself out in the field and left no one to sign in his absence. Uh oh. We couldn’t get the border patrol approval to even be in the southern desert or collect any animals without that permit. So Auggie called in a favor, of many thus far. His former teacher is head of the office that we needed to get the permission, so he did a quick change into his suit in the back of the van and drove into the part of town with the government office. Drove, if that’s what you call it. More like slowly slid between and around the obstructions of other vehicles.

On the way, he tried to reach his brother so that he could take over driving and keep the van moving while he was in the office. He asked if I could drive, and the gung-ho eager to help part of me said “Sure!” But then I realized that it’s not only a great big van but also the steering wheel is on the right. At least they drive on the right, but that’s also weirdly opposite of a right sided steering wheel. And there’s no convention for which side of the car is the driver’s side, because it depends entirely on where the car was manufactured. There’s a Hyundai in front of me right now with the driver on the left.

And then we pulled into a ‘parking lot’, where vehicles pretty much sit where they fit. We looped around a couple of times, squeezing between cars with just an inch to spare on either side. They double park and block one another in. Basically, if other vehicles can continue to navigate the circle around the lot, the cars will park where they can. Auggie reached his brother who was supposed to come, and then he took off. I’d not met his brother, so I was just waiting for some strange guy to turn up and hop in the van. And then he did and backed us into a space that was immediately blocked in by two more vehicles. He just grinned at me and ran off. 

An hour passed and then more. I had been fine and even dozed for a bit until my bladder decided otherwise, and that’s when I saw the museum. The Zanabazar Museum is the oldest fine art museum in Mongolia, and they had a bathroom. I paid 15,000 tugrik (about $4) for a ticket and managed to wander a couple of galleries before Auggie came to tell me that the office closed for lunch. It’s a fabulous little museum with wood cut prints of Buddhist figures, ornamental saddles and harnesses and clothing, and traditional line drawings of local species.

Once we secured the permit and we were ready to go, I thought “how in the world are we getting out of this blocked parking space. Auggie walked up to one of the cars and inspected the dash, and that’s when I saw it - every car has a number on the dash. The phone number of the driver. Apparently this is a thing. The parking is so bad that it’s entirely acceptable to block people in, and you just call the driver when you need to leave. Auggie then showed me the piece on paper on the dash of our own van. 70 70 70 70. That’s the phone number of his friend who runs the transportation business. They’ve been friends since childhood when they used to race cars together, and ‘70’ was his friend’s racing number. He apparently spent $300k US dollars to secure that phone number for his business.

Permits are secured! Chemicals and supplies are ready to go. The team is assembled, and we hit the road at dawn. Or near enough.

Give voice to your crazy ideas

A lesson in manifesting your wishes to the world, also known as voicing the crazy ideas that you never expect to come true. Because you never know who might be in the room that thinks your idea sounds fun.

I have studied skeletal development and evolution for almost 20 years. I started the jerboa colony as a postdoc in Boston in 2008, and I travelled to collect specimens for the first time in the spring of 2007. That was to Inner Mongolia, China, and my postdoc advisor, Cliff Tabin, gave early indulgence to my craziest ideas. He sent me to China, where I don’t speak the language, to catch animals I’d never seen before. Eighteen years later, I’m making a career of it.

We’ve made a lot of progress with the samples we collected over four trips from 2007-2012 and with the colony now housed in my lab. We understand a lot more about development and evolution of extreme limb phenotypes the level of the organism, tissues and cells. We identified genes that are expressed different from mice in ways suggesting these genes might play roles in the extreme elongation of limb and/or tail vertebrae. We’ve started to crack the differences in their genomes that might shape the skeleton, but it’s extremely complex. Our best estimate right now is that there are more than 1,000 potentially important mutations, but that’s likely underpowered because we primarily study two animals - the Egyptian jerboa and mice.

But there are 33 species of jerboas, and technology has improved. Sequencing got cheaper, new sequencing approaches are possible, and there are new reagents to better preserve samples. With samples from more species, we could narrow down the sequences that evolved leading up to the common ancestor of all jerboas and changed less since they radiated. It could be a powerful advance in our understanding.

Much of this phylogenetic diversity is present in the southern desert of Mongolia, and colleagues from the University of New Mexico have gone regularly, collecting mammals and their internal and external parasites over the last two decades. I’ve long wanted to join their team, but right around when I had the clear reason, funding for their expeditions ended.

And then in October of 2023, I spoke at a conference in Vancouver where I ended my talk with the rationale for getting materials from more species, and I flippantly ended with “So if anyone wants to send me to Mongolia…” and folks giggled. And then five months later I was at another conference, dashing past the coffee table up to my room to get my charger for my talk in the next session when a man caught my eye and said “I want to send you to Mongolia.” And now, here I am on a flight to Tokyo, after a flight to San Fransisco and before a flight to Ulaanbataar (it’s a lot of flying) with the whole team. We’ll spend just a few days in the capital city of Mongolia prepping gear and supplies and head out for a 2-3 day drive south to the desert around Dalanzagdad. It’s remote. No field station. No town nearby. Just nature. I have a green diamond-shaped solo tent that will be my home for a bit over 2 weeks. There will be 13 of us total - some from the US and some from Mongolia, all catching mammals, focused on jerboas, and collecting everything that we can for future lines of research. 

Everything will ache and my guts may hate me for this (lots of goat!), but I’m excited for new experiences and for what we may learn from this opportunity. So say your crazy out loud. It might not be so crazy…