China’s building boom digs up a star
New unearthed dinosaur bones help scientists rewrite understanding of the tree of life
YANJI, CHINA— At the end of a street of newly built highrises in the northern Chinese city of Yanji stands an exposed cliff face, where paleontologists scrape away100 million-year-old rock in search of prehistoric bones.
Like many fossil excavation sites in China, this one was discovered by accident.
China’s rapid city building has churned up a motherlode of dinosaur fossils. While bulldozers have unearthed prehistoric sites in many countries, the scale and speed of China’s urbanization is unprecedented, according to the United Nations Development Program.
Perhaps no one has seized the scientific opportunity more than Xu Xing, a diligent and unassuming standardbearer for China’s new prominence in paleontology. The energetic researcher has named more dinosaur species than any living paleontologist, racing between dig sites to collect specimens and further scientists’ understanding of how birds evolved from dinosaurs.
Matthew Lamanna, a curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, said Xu is “widely regarded as one of the foremost, if not the foremost, dinosaur paleontologist working in China today.”
“Xu Xing is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G,” Kristina Curry Rogers, a paleontologist at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote in an email.
Two years ago, Xu’s colleague at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, Jin Changzhu, was visiting family in Yanji when he heard talk of fossils uncovered at a construction site. A preliminary inspection yielded what appeared to be a dinosaur shoulder bone.
Less than an hour’s drive from the North Korean border, the mid-size city has been erecting residential blocks quickly. Seen from a plane, Yanji looks like a Legoland of new pink- and blueroofed buildings, but there’s one long empty lot of exposed rocky hillside — the excavation site.
When Xu arrived at Yanji, he recognized the site could fill gaps in the fossil record, noting the relative paucity of bones recovered from the late Cretaceous period, which was around100 million years ago. An analysis of the layers of volcanic ash revealed the site’s age. Xu is now overseeing a team of scientists using picks, chisels and steel needles to study the exposed hillside, where geologic layers resemble a red and grey layer-cake.
The site has yielded partial skeletons of three ancient crocodiles and one sauropod, the giant plant-eating dinosaurs that included some of the world’s largest land animals.
“This is a major feature of paleontology here in China — lots of construction really helps the scientists to find new fossils,” said Xu as he used a needle to remove debris from a partially exposed crocodile skull.
Born in 1969 in China’s western Xinjiang region, Xu did not choose to study dinosaurs. Like most university students of his era, he was assigned a major. His love for the field grew in graduate school in the 1990s, as feathered dino- saurs recovered from ancient Chinese lakebeds drew global attention.
When Xu and Jin discovered fossils in Yanji in 2016, city authorities halted construction on adjacent highrise buildings, in accordance with a national law.
“The developer was really not happy with me,” said Xu, but the local government has since embraced its new-found claim to fame.
The city is now facilitating Xu’s work, and even built an on-site police station to guard the fossils from theft. Once the excavation is complete, a museum is planned, to display recovered fossils and photos of Xu’s team at work.
It’s not the first museum to commemorate Xu, whose prodigious fieldwork has taken him across China and resulted in a flurry of articles in top scientific journals.
Toru Sekiyu, a paleontologist from the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in Japan who assisted on the Yanji dig, called his Chinese colleague “a superstar paleontologist.” But Xu is quick to point out the role that good fortune has played in his career.
“To publish papers and discover new species, you need new data — you need new fossils,” he said, adding that finding new species isn’t something a scientist can plan. “My experience tells me that you really need luck, besides your hard work. Then you can make some important discoveries.”