Roy Chapman Andrews started at the American Museum of Natural History in 1906 sweeping floors in the taxidermy department. By the 1920s he was leading the museum's Central Asiatic Expeditions into Mongolia's Gobi Desert -- officially searching for evidence of early human origins in Asia, a hypothesis that never panned out, but the expeditions found something else entirely.[3][1]
At the Flaming Cliffs in 1923, Andrews's team found nests of fossilized eggs -- the first dinosaur eggs ever recognized by science, proving conclusively that dinosaurs laid eggs rather than bearing live young. The same expeditions turned up the first known Protoceratops and the first Oviraptor, a name Andrews chose meaning 'egg thief' because the specimen was found near a nest -- an interpretation later overturned when paleontologists realized the animal was likely brooding its own eggs, not raiding another's.[1][2]
Andrews's reputation as a swashbuckling field man -- reportedly one inspiration, among several, for the Indiana Jones character -- later gave way to museum administration; he served as director of AMNH from 1934 to 1942. He died in 1960.[1][3]