A black coach pulls up at the entrance to the sunlit valley and a young tour guide with a weary face appears at the door, soon to be pushed from the bus by a dozen excited, elderly tourists.
A grandmother says in a dignified Shanghai accent: 'Comrades, let's loot some bones.'
The crowd cheers and heads to the entrance. No one pays attention to the tour guide, who tries to catch up, saying: 'Ladies and gentleman, welcome to World Dinosaur Valley.'
World Dinosaur Valley is the latest name for the dinosaur site in Ana village, in Yunnan's Lufeng county, about an hour's drive east of the provincial capital Kunming .
The name sounds good to business people and county officials but is somewhat misleading. The dinosaur fossils on display were found on top of a ridge, not in the valley. But it certainly attracts tourists, with more than six million having visited the site in less than two years and daily numbers increasing rapidly.
The Ana site, discovered 15 years ago, stunned palaeontologists because of the quantity and quality of its fossils. They included several previously unknown species and not just dinosaurs, but even small plants, fishes and turtles, all fossilised in breathtaking detail.
'This is where the Jurassic returns to life,' said Professor Dong Zhiming , China's foremost dinosaur expert.