I enjoy these kind of tidbits. You never hear much about "nice" science from our former enemies. This also reminds me of the only fossils (ever) of the Spinosaurus which were destroyed in Germany by Allied bombing.
Where art thou Spinosaurus?
Anyway, these fossils were old news to me, but I guess the fact that Soviet scientists recovered them was conveniently left out in our part of the world.
Quote:While North American teams were shut out of Mongolia during the Cold War, expeditions by Soviet and Polish scientists, in collaboration with Mongolian colleagues, recovered several more specimens of Velociraptor. The most famous is part of the legendary "Fighting Dinosaurs" specimen, discovered by a Polish-Mongolian team in 1971. This fossil preserves a single Velociraptor in the midst of battle against a lone Protoceratops.
Between 1988 and 1990, a joint Chinese-Canadian team discovered Velociraptor remains in northern China; joint Mongolian-American expeditions to the Gobi, led by the American Museum of Natural History and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, turned up several well-preserved skeletons between 1990 and 1995.
From Wikipedia's Velociraptor article.
The image is from a little excavation kit/toy. It may not be the real deal, but at least you get a mental picture.
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