Page 32 - Aruba Today

A32 FEATURE
Friday 26 OctOber 2018

China building boom uncovers buried dinosaurs, makes a star

By CHRISTINA LARSON an on-site police station
YANJI, China (AP) — At the to guard the fossils from
end of a street of newly theft. Once the excavation
built high-rises in the north- is complete, a museum is
ern Chinese city of Yanji planned, to display recov-
stands an exposed cliff ered fossils and photos of
face, where paleontolo- Xu's team at work.
gists scrape away 100 mil- It's not the first museum to
lion-year-old rock in search commemorate Xu, whose
of prehistoric bones. prodigious fieldwork has
Like many fossil excavation taken him across China
sites in China, this one was and resulted in a flurry of
discovered by accident. articles in top scientific jour-
China's rapid city building nals.
has churned up a moth- Toru Sekiyu, a paleontolo-
erlode of dinosaur fossils. gist from the Fukui Prefec-
While bulldozers have un- tural Dinosaur Museum in
earthed prehistoric sites in Japan who assisted on the
many countries, the scale Yanji dig, called his Chinese
and speed of China's ur- colleague "a superstar pa-
banization is unprecedent- leontologist."
ed, according to the Unit- But Xu is quick to point out
ed Nations Development In this Sept. 13, 2018, photo, paleontologist Xu Xing brushes away sediment to examine fossils the role that good fortune
Program. recovered from a dig site in Yanji, China. has played in his career.
Perhaps no one has seized Associated Press "To publish papers and dis-
the scientific opportunity cover new species, you
more than Xu Xing, a dili- there's one long empty lot The site has yielded partial assigned a major. His love need new data — you
gent and unassuming stan- of exposed rocky hillside — skeletons of three ancient for the field grew in gradu- need new fossils," he said,
dard-bearer for China's the excavation site. crocodiles and one sauro- ate school in the 1990s, as adding that finding new
new prominence in pale- When Xu arrived at Yan- pod, the giant plant-eating feathered dinosaurs recov- species isn't something a
ontology. The energetic re- ji, he recognized the site dinosaurs that included ered from ancient Chinese scientist can plan.
searcher has named more could fill gaps in the fossil some of the world's largest lakebeds drew global at- "My experience tells me
dinosaur species than any record, noting the relative land animals. tention. that you really need luck,
living paleontologist, racing paucity of bones recov- "This is a major feature of When Xu and Jin discov- besides your hard work.
between dig sites to col- ered from the late Creta- paleontology here in China ered fossils in Yanji in 2016, Then you can make some
lect specimens and further ceous period, which was — lots of construction really city authorities halted con- important discoveries."
scientists' understanding of around 100 million years helps the scientists to find struction on adjacent high- With digs in Inner Mongolia,
how birds evolved from di- ago. An analysis of the new fossils," said Xu as he rise buildings, in accor- Liaoning, Yunnan and oth-
nosaurs. layers of volcanic ash re- used a needle to remove dance with a national law. er Chinese provinces, Xu
Matthew Lamanna, a cu- vealed the site's age. Xu is debris from a partially ex- "The developer was really patiently oversees excava-
rator at the Carnegie Mu- now overseeing a team of posed crocodile skull. not happy with me," said tions, sometimes chiseling
seum of Natural History in scientists using picks, chisels Born in 1969 in China's west- Xu, but the local govern- for years before he knows
Pittsburgh, said Xu is "widely and steel needles to study ern Xinjiang region, Xu did ment has since embraced their ultimate significance.
regarded as one of the the exposed hillside, where not choose to study dino- its newfound claim to fame. While his finds are wide-
foremost, if not the fore- geologic layers resemble a saurs. Like most university The city is now facilitating ranging, much of his ca-
most, dinosaur paleontolo- red and gray layer-cake. students of his era, he was Xu's work, and even built reer has focused on un-
gist working in China to- derstanding how dinosaurs
day." evolved into modern birds.
"Xu Xing is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G," China is an ideal location
Kristina Curry Rogers, a pa- for that study. Two de-
leontologist at Macalester cades ago, rare dinosaur
College in St. Paul, Minne- fossils that preserved traces
sota, wrote in an email. of feathers were found in
Two years ago, Xu's col- ancient lakebeds of north-
league at the Chinese eastern China. This discov-
Academy of Sciences ery, which helped scientists
in Beijing, Jin Changzhu, demonstrate that birds de-
was visiting family in Yanji scended from dinosaurs,
when he heard talk of fos- was possible because the
sils uncovered at a con- mixture of volcanic ash and
struction site. A preliminary fine-grained shale in the
inspection yielded what lakebeds had preserved
appeared to be a dinosaur bits of soft tissue, includ-
shoulder bone. ing feathers — unlike the
Less than an hour's drive majority of dinosaur fossils,
from the North Korean bor- which contain only bone.
der, the midsize city has Since then, a flood of new
been erecting residential dinosaur bones unearthed
blocks quickly. Seen from in China has helped sci-
a plane, Yanji looks like a In this Sept. 12, 2018, photo, a dinosaur model stands near the site of a future dinosaur museum entists rewrite their under-
Legoland of new pink- and in Yanji, China. standing of the tree of life
blue-roofed buildings, but Associated Press in various ways.q