There are few roads in the southern Mongolia steppes—the flat grasslands woven in among the dunes and rocky hollows of the Gobi Desert. You simply drive in the direction you want to go, and if there happens to be a trail worn by previous travelers, fantastic. Even if not, the pace can be surprisingly brisk—sometimes hitting 60-plus miles per hour over scrubby terrain, vehicles yawing back and forth across the loose surface, demanding constant counter-steering. It’s the kind of overland adventuring that quickens the pulse.

I knocked out about 40 miles of this hardscrabble travel recently, traveling with members of the Explorer’s Club Hong Kong Chapter and the Mongolian Institute of Paleontology and Geology aboard a combination of Nissan Navara pickups and Infiniti SUVs. The former came from Nomadic Expeditions (experts in all things Mongolia), while Infiniti provided its vehicles as part of the brand's support of the mission I’d come to observe: a renewed search for fossilized dinosaur remains in a region of the Gobi first harvested by archaeologist and paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews a century ago.

Fossils were abundant back then—practically littering the ground, as Andrews recalled in his reports. (Fun fact: He was one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones.) But he loaded up his camels and Dodge trucks with tons of fragile remains and trundled them off for study; that was followed by a century of digging by other scientists, as well as plenty of illegal fossil poaching once the richness of Mongolia’s buried heritage became known. Nowadays, the search for dinosaurs and their prehistoric ilk is more complex. You have to look harder and dig deeper.