mission of the Dinosaur Project was to improve the understanding of dinosaurs from North America and Asia by conducting field work in the Canadian Arctic, the Gobi Desert, the Junggar Basin, and other places of interest over the course of the following eight years. Philip J. Currie of the Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, Dong Zhiming of the IVPP, and Dale Russell of the Canadian Museum of Nature served as project leads for the CCDP. Dong Zhiming and Sun Ailing of the IVPP visited Alberta in October–November 1985. The project's official logo featured the English word "dinosaur" adjacent to its Chinese translation: "恐龙". Field work Field work related to the China-Canada Dinosaur Project began in May 1986 with an eight-day expedition to the Gobi Desert, the first to involve Western scientists since 1930. In the early summer a larger-scale reconnaissance mission was led by Currie, Dong, and Russell in which they and their team travelled across the Gobi to identify sites of interest for dig teams in the future. This three-week excursion was the first major operation of the Dinosaur Project and marked the first use of eight Jeeps granted to the CCDP by the Toronto-based Donner Canadian Foundation. The team also visited fossil sites in Alberta, Montana, and the Arctic, with their first fossil-collecting mission occurring in Dinosaur Provincial Park in July, where the project's first major find - a troodontid braincase - was made by Tang Zhilu. The 1987 field season was extremely productive for the CCDP. Between August and October, the team uncovered fossils which would later serve as the holotypes for Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum and Sinraptor dongi in China, and began work on the Devil's Coulee fossil site discovered earlier in the summer by Wendy Sloboda in Canada. In 1988, Dale Russell discovered the therizinosaurid Alxasaurus in the Gobi Desert. A team led by Phil Currie uncovered five juvenile Pinacosaurus and sixty-six protoceratopsians near the town of Bayan Mandahu, in addition to three dinosaur egg nests and an incomplete Alectrosaurus skeleton from the Iren Dabasu Formation. Two years later, further work at the site would uncover seven more juvenile Pinacosaurus in the same quarry. The 1989 field season represented a turning point for the Dinosaur Project. Canadian researchers arrived in China and began work on dig sites in Xinjiang amid ongoing protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Following the government crackdown against demonstrators on 4 June, the government of