Mark Norell, a globe-trotting paleontologist whose research focused on the evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds, and whose expeditions yielded rare discoveries like the nearly intact embryo of a birdlike oviraptor, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 68.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by heart failure, said his brother, Todd.
Dr. Norell, for many years the chairman of the American Museum of Natural History’s division of paleontology, hunted for fossils in China, Chile, Argentina, Romania, the Sahara and Mongolia. His main research was on the links between theropod dinosaurs (a group of bipedal carnivores) and birds, the subject of “Dinosaurs Among Us,” one of the exhibitions that he curated at the museum, in 2016.
Asked at the time of that exhibition by the WNYC radio host Leonard Lopate if all birds were descendants of dinosaurs, Dr. Norell said: “They certainly are. Just like humans are a kind of primate, birds are a kind of dinosaur.”
Dinosaurs did not go completely extinct, he added; they survived as birds.
After decades of Western paleontologists being barred from hunting for fossils in Mongolia, Dr. Norell and Michael Novacek in 1990 led a team from the Museum of Natural History that explored the desolate terrain of the Gobi Desert in association with the Mongolian Academy of Sciences.
In 1993, in the summertime heat of the Gobi, the group discovered an astonishingly fertile fossil field called Ukhaa Tolgood. Its many varieties of remarkably well-preserved skeletons included birdlike dinosaurs like oviraptors and velociraptors, lizards and mammals.
“The Gobi is a paradise for paleontologists,” Dr. Norell wrote, with his colleagues Dr. Novacek, Malcolm McKenna and James Clark, in Scientific American in 2014. “Its eroding terrain exposes nearly complete skeletons of creatures hitherto known only through painstaking reconstructions from a few scattered bones. Freshly exposed skeletons sometimes look more like the recent remains of a carcass than like an 80-million-year-old fossil.”
Dr. Novacek recalled in an interview that the team had already made some impressive discoveries in 1993 when Dr. Norell announced, “I think I just found the best thing I’ve ever found in my life.”
He had uncovered a cracked-open oviraptor egg with its curled up embryo, which appeared to have been close to hatching, as well as an adult oviraptor fossil that was found, during excavation, to have been brooding over a nest of eggs. The team discovered more nesting oviraptors at the site over the next few years, as well as specimens of other dinosaurs, like the beaked, herbivorous protoceratops.
The behavior of the nesting dinosaurs further confirmed their connection to birds, Dr. Novacek said, with their careful positioning of the eggs, which was probably a way to optimize incubation.
“That really underscored the close relationship between living birds and dinosaurs,” he added. “A lot of the features of the skeletons of oviraptors found in that site, as well as the theropod dinosaurs exquisitely preserved with feathers from Northern China, which Mark also worked on, showed the connections in many structural aspects of skulls, limbs, claws, brains and sensory system that are similar to birds.”
Dr. Norell, who worked in the Gobi for nearly 30 years, was known for surviving the extreme conditions of the desert with equanimity. For his no-frills camping style, he was featured on the cover of a 1999 issue of Sports Afield magazine. Touting the article as “Secrets of the Wildman,” the magazine called him the “Obi-Wan Kenobi of ‘dirtbagging,’” for sleeping on the ground, refusing to use high-tech camping gear and, during a five-week desert expedition, changing clothes once and bathing twice.
“I bring stuff I can wear and dispose,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “A ripped and trashed T-shirt with a little gasoline on it starts a pretty good campfire.”
Mark Allen Norell was born on July 26, 1957, in St. Paul, Minn., and grew up mainly in Downey, Calif., near Los Angeles, with his parents and brother. His father, Don, was a structural engineer, and his mother, Helen (Soltau) Norell, managed the household.
He had an early interest in the natural world. As a child, he collected insects, rocks and fossils and made museum-style displays in his room, including one of a coyote skeleton that he reassembled. In middle school, his science teacher recommended him for a program in the paleontology department of the Los Angeles County Museum, and in high school, he accompanied its scientists on fossil hunts in the Mojave Desert and Mexico.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology from California State University, Long Beach, in 1980; a master’s degree in biology from San Diego State University in 1983; a master’s in philosophy from Yale University in 1986; and a Ph.D in biology from Yale in 1988.
He lectured at Yale for a year before he was hired by the Museum of Natural History as an assistant curator in 1989. He was promoted to curator in 1999, when he was also appointed chairman of the museum’s paleontology division, a position he held from 1999 to 2006 and again from 2008 to 2021, when he became chairman emeritus.
Dr. Norell was a curator of numerous exhibitions at the museum, including “Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park” (1993) and “Fighting Dinosaurs: New Discoveries from Mongolia” (2000), about the 80-million-year-old fossils of a velociraptor and protoceratops that were preserved in the heat of battle, the former’s foot claw sunk deeply into the neck of the latter.
“There is no doubt these animals were fighting,” Dr. Norell told New Scientist magazine. “There is nothing else like the fighting dinosaurs, which captures direct evidence of a single instant in time.”
His books included several aimed at children, like “Searching for Velociraptor” (1996) and “A Nest of Dinosaurs: The Story of Oviraptor” (1999), both with Lowell Dingus, and “Unearthing the Dragon: The Great Feathered Dinosaur Discovery” (2005).
In addition to his brother, Dr. Norell is survived by his daughter, Inga Pan Norell. His wife, Vivian Pan, died in 2023. She had earned a Ph.D. in geology with a specialty in geochemistry and worked in government before becoming a founding partner of an investment advisory firm.
When the museum was considering hiring Dr. Norell, he had not yet worked professionally in paleontology; at the time, he was working in molecular biology. But when he was asked if he would turn his focus to dinosaurs, he agreed.
“I am not that interested in dinosaurs for the sake of dinosaurs or even interested in when they populated the planet,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2009. “I’m interested in creating questions in science that someone hasn’t thought to answer yet.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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