The shifting sand of what was, even then, the Gobi Desert have ensured that fossils of the animals that lived there can be found in exactly the position in which they were buried, with most of the bones together.
The most notable fossil, dubbed the Fighting Dinosaurs, is the very well preserved remains of a Velociraptor, locked in combat with a Protoceratops,[1] a small ceratopsian.
Altai is unusual because the comparative lack of food means that most of the dinosaurs there remained quite small, most not much bigger than a present-day person.
Small ankylosaurs were the armour-plated residents and hadrosaurs provided large prey for the carnivores.
The Gobi Desert was often interspersed with scrubland and occasionally a dense rainforest supporting many types of plant life, insects, and small dinosaurs like Shuvuuia and Mononykus.