Foreword
It was seldom that the Oracle of Delphi gave an immediate response to the solicitous inquiries of those seeking Divine counsel; repeated libations and other sacrifices were offered at the shrine; the final reply of the gods was diplomatic, so that the ambiguity of Delphic utterance has become proverbial.
Not so with the American Museum quest in the arid Temple of Nature in Mongolia; almost at the very outset the invincible leader, Roy Chapman Andrews, aided by his highly trained American experts, met with the unequivocal response: Asia is the mother of the continents!
The initial discovery in the Gobi Desert of the presence of fossil quadrupeds, christened "Titanotheres" (or beasts of titanic size) when discovered in South Dakota, in 1852, gave an answer to one of the four great questions which the Expedition undertook to solve; namely,
whether ancient Asia was the mother of the life of Europe to the far west and of North America to the far east. It was a realization similar to the discovery of a palaeontologic Garden of Eden — of the birthplace or Asiatic homeland from which many kinds of reptiles and mammals spread westward and eastward.
The existence of such a centre had long been a matter of pure theory on the part of palaeontologists, and as early as 1900 the writer of this foreword summed up his faith in the existence of such an Asiatic homeland, publishing in the columns of Science (April 13, 1900, page 567) a prophecy which may be paraphrased as follows: "We now turn to the northern hemisphere,
to the Arctogaea or homeland area of animal dispersal in the dawn period of the mammalian life on the soil of the northern hemisphere.
First, on opposite sides of the globe we observe two great colonies, one in Europe and one in the Rocky Mountain region of America, which are full of different degrees of kindred in their mammalian life; yet they are separated by ten thousand miles of intervening land in which not a single similar form is found.
"The fact that the same kinds of mammals and reptiles appear simultaneously in Europe and in the Rocky Mountain region has long been considered strong evidence for the hypothesis that "the dispersal centre is half-way between.' 1 In this dispersal centre, during the close of the Age of Reptiles and the beginning of the Age of Mammals,