DINO HUNTER.

Is traveling the world to study dinosaurs your idea of a hot job? It is for this adventurous scientist.

One day in the summer of 1993, fossil hunter Michael Novacek was four-wheeling through the lunar landscape of Mongolia's Gobi Desert with his team of paleontologists (scientists who study plant and animal fossils). Their aim: to scour the area for a new site to dig. In the distance, the group spotted patches of glistening white amid outcroppings of red rocks, and headed for them. As he stepped from his vehicle, Novacek nearly tripped over the skeleton of an 80 million-year-old Protoceratops, a pony-sized dinosaur.

Within an hour the team unearthed 40 fossil skulls they found poking out of the soil. "It was amazing," Novacek says. "That morning we doubled the number of dino skulls ever found for certain species." The discovery also turned out to be the single richest site for Cretaceous (prehistoric period 144 to 65 million years ago) fossils to date. While most fossil finds produce merely skull or bone fragments, desert sands had preserved entire skeletons of prehistoric dinos, mammals, and lizards.

For Novacek, being a paleontologist may literally be one of the hottest science careers on Earth. He's led two-month expeditions to the sweltering Gobi Desert for the last 11 years: "We only get to shower once or twice all summer," he says. The team's only source of water is trucked in from a spring 129 kilometers (80 miles) away, and raging 100 mile-per-hour sandstorms batter them. The area is so remote it takes a 20-member crew a week to drive a caravan of vehicles to their excavation site. "There's no orientation in the desert," says Novacek. "We get lost a lot."

Why does this paleontologist yearn for such grueling expeditions? Studying dinosaurs mesmerized Novacek as a boy. His favorite childhood read: All About Dinosaurs by Roy Chapman Andrews--who led the only other Gobi digs by an American back in the 1920s. In his late teens, Novacek played in a rock 'n roll band while taking college biology courses at UCLA. Then a professor took him on a fossil dig in New Mexico--and at the age of 19, Novacek found his future.

After earning his Ph.D. in paleontology, Novacek began his fossil research at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he's now curator of paleontology. Novacek has traveled the world from Wyoming to Yemen in his quest for fossils. "It's magical to discover something so amazing that exists in nature," he says.

* Education: You need a graduate degree in geology or biology with a thesis on fossils to become a paleontologist.

* Ph.D. paleontologists can earn a starting salary of $50,000 a year.

For more on the Gobi digs, check out: www.amnh.org/science/ expeditions/gobi/

Dig It

Since 1989, Mike Novacek has led II expeditions to the Gobi Desert. Before each trip, he plans routes and excavation sites with Mongolian colleagues.

A scientist collects samples of dinosaur bone from a rocky cliff.

Fossils are excavated very carefully. Paleontologists chip away hard sand with picks and brush sand off the bones.

Before fossils are removed from a dig site, scientists process them for safe shipping, coating them in glue. Once dry, the fossils are wrapped in a layer of thin paper, then encased in burlap soaked in plaster.