The great Chinese dinosaur boom
In northeastern China, paleontologists are in the midst of a gold rush of fossil finding, said Richard Conniff. They have uncovered dozens of new species of dinosaurs—and are rewriting what we know about the ancient world.
N OT LONG AGO in northeastern China, I found myself being driven in a Mercedes-Benz SUV down a winding country road, trailed by a small motorcade of local dignitaries, past flatroofed brick farmhouses and fields full of stubbled cornstalks. Abruptly, we arrived at our destination, and my guide, Fangfang, slipped out of her high heels into fieldwork gear: pink sneakers with bright blue pompoms on the Velcro straps. We were visiting a dinosaur dig, but there was also a museum under construction—steel beams riveted together to form layers, stacked one atop another, climbing a hillside in two parallel rows. The two wings connected by a central pavilion looked like a bird about to take off. The new museum—its name roughly translates as Liaoning Beipiao Sihetun Ancient Fossils Museum—is due to open sometime in 2019. It was unmistakably huge. It was also expensive (Fangfang estimated $28 million for construction alone). And it was in the middle of nowhere. We were in a rural village called Sihetun, about 250 miles northeast of Beijing. In the exuberant fashion of a lot of modern development in China, the new structure is going up in anticipation of visitors arriving by speed train from the capital, except that the speed train network hasn’t been built yet. The new museum is located at an epicenter of modern paleontological discovery, an area that is at least as rich in fossils, and in some ways as wild, as the American West during the great era of dinosaur discovery in the late 19th century. In the mid-1990s, on that hillside in Sihetun, a farmer stumbled onto the world’s first known feathered dinosaur, a creature now named Sinosauropteryx (“the China dragon bird”). Actually, the farmer found two halves of a slab, each preserving a mirror image of this dinosaur. In the freewheeling spirit that has characterized the fossil trade in the area ever since, he sold one half to one unwitting museum and one half to another. It was the start of a fossil gold rush. The region has yielded more than 40 dinosaur species to date. Standing on a slope a few minutes’ walk from the museum site, my guide pointed out the hills of a nearby farm where Yutyrannus, a 3,100-pound feathered dinosaur, turned up a few years ago. (Think Tyrannosaurus rex, but plumed like a Mardi Gras Indian.) This was also the or bureaucratic career building. There’s typically former home range of Anchiornis huxleyi, lots of money for constructing new a chicken-size creature with enough preserved buildings, less for acquiring collections, detail to become the first dinosaur and none at all, at least in the provinces, ever described feather by feather in its for scientific staff to make sense of them. authentic colors—an event one paleontologist Many of the best specimens also turn up in likened to “the birth of color TV.” Beijing, or at the Shandong Tianyu Nature
Museum seven hours south of the capital, What has emerged from beneath the fields which one paleontologist described as “the of Liaoning province (and parts of neighboring best place to see Liaoning fossils.” provinces) is, however, bigger than
O dinosaurs: A couple of decades of digging NE CHILLY DECEMBER morning, a have uncovered two miraculously wellpreserved week into my trip, I looked out a ancient worlds. The first, called hotel window in Chaoyang, a city the Yanliao Biota, is from the middle-late of 3 million about 45 miles west of Sihetun. Jurassic period, 166 million years ago. The The mist rose off a bend in the Daling second, the Jehol Biota, is Cretaceous, from River, and the sunrise lit up the mountains. 131 million to 120 million years ago. Some say Chaoyang gets its name from an
old poem about a mythological bird singing The Jehol is more famous among paleontologists, to the rising sun. It’s known today as a city and far more diverse. Among for fossils, and some of its most celebrated the ancient biota—or plant and animal inhabitants are extinct birds. life—found so far: four turtle species,
These fossils might not wow visitors whose eight amphibian species, 15 fishes, 17
idea of paleontology is limited to massive mammals, 24 of the winged reptiles called
dinosaur reconstructions at other natural pterosaurs, and no fewer than 53 ancient
history museums. What Liaoning province bird species. Taken together, these finds
typically produces are articulated skeletons tell dramatic new stories about the dinosaur
in slabs of stone. I first saw one lying flat in origin of birds and the evolution of
a glass display case at the Beijing Museum feathers and flight.
of Natural History, too high off the ground Liaoning already has at least 10 other fossil for children to see, and often obscured for museums, some with important collections, adults by lighting ingeniously positioned in others mainly products of local boosterism precisely the wrong spots. Then I looked