Zigong
cctv.com 03-17-2005 10:15
Welcome to the Jurassic Park of China! But don't worry, there's no live T-rex roaming around, just a bunch of fossils. I guess a lot of people would probably take issue if their city is called a place of dinosaurs, but not here in Zigong. Because this is where they discovered the most dinosaur fossils in the whole country. Of course the city has a lot more to offer than the dinosaurs, but this is where we are gonna start today!
Unlike my little friends at Beijing, I'd never been to a dinosaur museum before; so my knowledge on the subject is pretty much limited to those 3D images and unsettling howlers created by Hollywood technology.
Located at Dashanpu Township in the northeast suburbs of Zigong, the museum is the third largest dinosaur museum in the world built on the actual fossil site and the largest in Asia.
The museum showcases some 40 complete dinosaur skeletons and over 100 pieces of dinosaur fossils, some of which are one-of-a-kind species. I'm not going to list the tongue-twister like scientific names here, what is more relevant is that the collection is one of the largest, best conditioned, and most valuable worldwide.
Southwest China is one of the most fertile areas for dinosaur digs on the planet; and nowhere else are the relics more abundant than in Zigong. The fossils here at Zigong museum almost covered all the varieties of dinosaurs from the Mid-Jurassic age, a nearly unfathomably long span of time from 210 million years ago to 135 million years ago.
Dashanpu dinosaur locale is also known as a dinosaur cemetery as over 10,000 fossils of nearly 200 dinosaurs and other vertebrates have been excavated from an area of merely 2800 square meters.
Wandering inside this jungle of skeletons, I sort of understand why passion toward dinosaurs only belongs to kids and people who still have a kid's heart.
Imagine over 200 million years ago, this could well be the paradise for dinosaurs. There are just so many mysteries regarding these gigantic reptiles, for example, how come they just disappeared like overnight from the surface of the earth? And specifically regarding this place Zigong, why did so many different kinds of dinosaurs come to this area and die here? I don't know, and looks like it still remain a mystery even to paleontologists. And probably the biggest mystery regarding Zigong is that they've found so many dinosaur bones here, but not even a single egg! Maybe my little friends can help me here.
Hope that will give paleontologist a clue since there is still no scientific consensus on the question yet. One speculation goes that the dinosaur eggshell from that time period were so thin that they vanished before they could fossilize.
The museum covers only a small segment of the Dashanpu dinosaur quarry. The exploration of the quarry is an on-going project now, as there may be more accumulations of fossils in the area.
The fossils were first spotted by a team of geologists by chance in 1972 and excavated several years later. Scientific research shows that the climate and vegetation of Zigong area during Jurassic Period provide an ideal habitat for dinosaurs; and many dinosaur bodies were carried by the river water to Dashanpu, a calm sand shoal at the time.
