A brief summary of Dr. Martin Kundrát’s recent field trip to Uzbekistan

A brief summary of Dr. Martin Kundrát’s recent field trip to Uzbekistan

A brief summary of Dr. Martin Kundrát’s recent field trip to Uzbekistan

09/07 2021

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With warmth and sincere gratitude, we would like to share a brief summary of Dr. Martin Kundrát’s recent field trip to Uzbekistan. 

In June 2021, I made my second visit at the International Institute of the Central Asian Studies (IICAS) in Samarkand. 

As in 2019, I enjoyed again very friendly atmosphere byfriends from IICAS. In particular, very fruitful were professional meetings with Mr. Alim Feyzulayev with whomdiscussed some critical issues concerning my project The Central Asian Paleontological Heritage: Dinosaur of the Silk Road – The Slovak-Uzbek Exploration Project. Alim, and his colleague Erkin Makhmudov were immensely helpful in searching for solutions of some unresolved issues. 

I was delighted to learn that the IICAS is going to support my brief visit in Kashkadarya and Surkhandarya by providing me with a powerful car in order to get familiar with a geographically complicated landscape. These are regions where footprints of giant dinosaurs were reported from in the past. This is the reason why we have included this area as worthy of more detailed exploration. 

And again, thanks to operational skills of my friend at the IICAS, I was pleased to work in the field side by side with the knowledgeable person, Dr. Muzaffar Norqobilov from Termez State UniversityWe visited a paleonotlogical site near the border with Tajikistan with enigmatic hoofed footprints left in strata claimed to be Cretaceous age by a Russian geologist in the 20th century.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all my friendsat the IICAS for their hospitality and help to solve the issues that are common when an exploration project of a large magnitude is concerned. Besides a cutting-edge climatic and paleobiodiversity research program, the project itself is also centered on setting the first Uzbek national representative collection of the Mesozoic vertebrates in support of development of the modern geoturism in the country.

Martin Kundrát

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