Success! Jan finds an 80 million year old dinosaur bone with his tongue.

According to locals, the quick and (ahem) dirty way to test to see if something is a fossil is to taste it: if it sticks hard to your tongue, it's a fossil. If it drops off immediately, it's just a rock.

At a site called Tugriigin Shiree, we taste a lot of rocks. Jan eventually discovers one that adheres so fast to his tongue that—to Angela's considerable amusement—he has trouble pulling it off. Our paleontologist doesn't endorse this crude test as a reliable way of identifying fossils. However, she confirms that the hunk of white material Jan has found is in fact a fossilized dinosaur bone. Based on the other skeletons that have been found in the area, she guesses that the bone is around 80 million years old, and is probably from a protoceratops.

Angela finds some dinosaur bone fragments too, and we feel like pretty successful fossil hunters. We're crushed to learn that Mongolian law prohibits taking fossils out of the country, and grudgingly leave our discoveries behind.

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