China produces most of the world's dinosaur fossils and almost every province has some excavation sites.
Geographic advantages, such as Yunnan's red sediments, contribute to such high productivity, but there is another, probably more important reason for China's leading role - money.
Since the mid-1990s, in order to publish papers in the world's top scientific journals, some mainland paleontologists have offered high prices to buy fossils from fossil dealers and farmers. Professor Dong Zhiming says a rare specimen could cost hundreds of thousands of yuan, more than an ordinary farmer would earn in a lifetime.
Everyone seemed to be happy. The farmers got some money, the dealers got rich, the researchers got their papers published in Science and Nature without having to leave their air-conditioned offices, and the world was shocked, almost monthly, by evolutionally striking species such as Sinosauropteryx, Rotarchaeopteryx, Beipiaosaurus and Confuciusornis.
The researchers happily adhere to a 200-year-old paleontological tradition and never mention fossil purchases in their papers. But just like other transactions that involve money, some scandals are bound to surface.
The most infamous involves a fossil of a species called Archaeoraptor. It was smuggled to the United States and sold for US$80,000. In 1999, National Geographic magazine published a joint study by US and mainland paleontologists who said it was evidence of the long-sought missing link between dinosaurs and birds. But the fossil was a forgery, made up from a bird's body and a dinosaur's tail.
