China will soon build its first dinosaur park, displaying the fossils of a variety of dinosaurs which lived between 150 to 180 million years ago.
The 60-million-yuan (US$7.2 million) park, covering 13 hectares, will be built on the site where the bones were excavated in Lufeng county, dubbed the "hometown of dinosaurs" in southwest China's Yunnan Province.
Lufeng county acquired its nickname after fossils of 80 dinosaurs were unearthed in a 60,000-square-meter pit at Dawa township in the 1930s.
The local government is working with the Shanghai Nature Museum on design plans and investment potential from both home and abroad.
Recent excavation in the county led to discovery of a 10,000-square-meter area containing fossils of numerous dinosaurs, some of which have been exposed to the open air.
Dong Zhiming, a leading paleontologist on dinosaur research, inferred that the area is a huge "graveyard of dinosaurs."
Keith Rigy, an American dinosaur expert who has visited Chuanjie on five occasions, estimates that there may be 400 to 500 dinosaurs fossils in the Chuanjie area.
"Chuanjie has now passed Utah in the United States and Zigong in southwest China's Sichuan Province to become the largest burial ground of dinosaurs in the world," he said.
During the recent excavation, Chinese archaeologists unearthed fossils of eight dinosaurs, which lay crisscross over a 220-square-meter area of mountain slope in Chuanjie. A 20-meter long carnivore was found on top of a 7-meter-long herbivore - the natural enemy of the carnivore.
"It is rare that the two kinds of dinosaurs died together," said Pan Shigang, an official with the Lufeng Dinosaur Museum.
The burial ground shows obvious signs of being a lake in ancient times, Pan said, and so the dinosaurs were likely washed together by the water after they died or were killed during dinosaur attacks.
Thus far, 120 dinosaurs dating back to the early or middle Jurassic Period have been excavated in Lufeng county.
"It is unprecedented in both China and elsewhere in the world that dinosaurs of the early and middle Jurassic Period were found in the same region," said Fang Xiaosi, a researcher with the China Geology Museum.
"The new discovery is of vital importance to the study of the evolution and migration of dinosaur in both the early Jurassic period and middle Jurassic Period," Professor Dong Zhiming said.
(Xinhua)
