The Flaming Cliffs site (also known as Bayanzag ( zh, 巴彥扎格), Bain-Dzak or Bayn Dzak) ( mn, Баянзаг ''rich in saxaul''), with the alternative Mongolian name of mn, Улаан Эрэг (''red cliffs''), is a region of the

Gobi Desert The Gobi Desert ( Chinese: 戈壁 (沙漠), Mongolian: Говь (ᠭᠣᠪᠢ)) () is a large desert or brushland region in East Asia, and is the sixth largest desert in the world. Geography The Gobi measures from southwest to northeast a ...

in the Ömnögovi Province of

Mongolia Mongolia; Mongolian script: , , ; lit. "Mongol Nation" or "State of Mongolia" () is a landlocked country in East Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south. It covers an area of , with a population of just 3.3 million ...

, in which important

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

finds have been made. It was given this name by American

paleontologist Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossi ...

Roy Chapman 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 led a series of expeditions through the politically disturbed ...

, who visited in the 1920s. The area is most famous for yielding the first discovery of dinosaur eggs. Other finds in the area include specimens of ''

Velociraptor ''Velociraptor'' (; ) is a genus of small dromaeosaurid dinosaur that lived in Asia during the Late Cretaceous epoch, about 75 million to 71 million years ago. Two species are currently recognized, although others have been assigned in th ...

'' and

eutheria Eutheria (; from Greek , 'good, right' and , 'beast'; ) is the clade consisting of all therian mammals that are more closely related to placentals than to marsupials. Eutherians are distinguished from noneutherians by various phenotypic tra ...

n mammals. It exposes rocks of the Djadochta Formation. It is illegal to remove fossils from the area without appropriate permits. The nickname refers to the red or orange color of the sandstone cliffs (especially at a sunset),. Jane Blunden . Mongolia: the Bradt travel guide. 2008
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Dinosaur bones/fossils

The following are dinosaur fossils that have been found in the Flaming Cliffs. Theropods: * Maniraptorans: '' Archaeornithoides'', ''

'', '' Saurornithoides, Oviraptor'' Ornithischians *

Ceratopsia Ceratopsia or Ceratopia ( or ; Greek: "horned faces") is a group of herbivorous, beaked dinosaurs that thrived in what are now North America, Europe, and Asia, during the Cretaceous Period, although ancestral forms lived earlier, in the Jurass ...

ns: '' Protoceratops'' *

Ankylosaurids Ankylosauridae () is a family of armored dinosaurs within Ankylosauria, and is the sister group to Nodosauridae. The oldest known Ankylosaurids date to around 122 million years ago and went extinct 66 million years ago during the Cretaceous–Pal ...

: '' Pinacosaurus''

Dinosaur bones/fossils

References

Further reading