To lend or not to lend? That has always been the big question for mainland museums that want to lend their dinosaur fossils but worry that they may be damaged in transit.
That fear was realised for the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Museum when one precious exhibit - a shoulder blade of the biggest dinosaur discovered in Asia - was smashed after arriving at the Hong Kong Science Museum for the Soaring Dinosaurs - Chinese Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life exhibition, which opened on Friday as part of the handover 10th anniversary celebrations.
Broken once before when exhibited in the US in 1995, the scapula of the 26-metre-long, 7.7-metre-tall Nuoerosaurus chaganensis hasn't been on loan until now. Just days before the show opened, the 2.4 metre-long fossil looks like a bandaged patient, tied together with string and white plaster.
The entire skeleton, 70 per cent of which is well preserved, was found in 1985 in Inner Mongolia during the construction of a large chemical factory. The creature lived about 100 million years ago, during the early Cretaceous period.
'Visitors won't see it like this,' says Feng Lu, a researcher at the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Museum. 'The strings will be taken away when the plaster is dry. Journalists ask me why we send replicas. This is why.'
The exhibition, which runs until November, features about 200 fossils of dinosaurs, ancient animals and plants unearthed on the mainland. Most are on loan from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Museum, with others from the Institute of Geology of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing, Chongqing Museum of Natural History and Lufeng Dinosaur Museum.