This year marks the 70^th anniversary of the first Joint Soviet-Mongolian Paleontological Expedition, which was important in pushing forward the study of the dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous. In 1946,  a team of Russian paleontologists came to Mongolia to explore for dinosaur fossil at the invitation of the then Linguistic Institute of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. This was followed by expeditions in 1947 and 1949. As part of the  anniversary, paleontologists from Russia and Mongolia and 'veterans' of the three expeditions held a Scientific Conference at Puma Imperial Hotel in Ulaanbaatar on Thursday 22^nd of September. The conference continues today in the Gobi at the site of the discovery of the remains of Mongolia's most famous dinosaur T-Bataar or Tarbosaurus. Here in 1946 the members of the first expedition discovered the remains of several large therapods including a full skeleton and a skull. This new dinosaur was similar to the Tyrannosaurus from North America and also the Alioramus of Mongolia and North China. The name, "Tarbosaurus", meaning "alarming lizard", was first given by the Soviet paleontologist Yevgeny Maleev in 1955. It was a fierce meat-eating dinosaur which lived 70-65 million years ago in what is now Mongolia and Northern China. Two thirds of all Tarbosaurus remains have been discovered in the Gobi desert at famous paleontological sites such as the Flaming Cliffs, also known as Bayanzag and Nemekht Mountain. During the Late Cretaceous, what is now the Gobi was fertile and crossed by rivers and contained a wide range of fauna.

The first scientifically recognized dinosaur egg fossils were discovered in the Bayanzag soum in 1923 by a team led by the famous explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, director of the American Museum of Natural History. The expedition originally came to Mongolia in search of discovering the remains of early humans – instead they found the fossils of five species of dinosaur. Mongolia is listed third in the discovery of  dinosaur fossils in the world.