China’s dinosaur expert digs up the prehistoric links with modern birds
- Rapid city construction churns up a mother lode of fossils for world-famous palaeontologist to study
- Excavation site is a cliff face at the end of an ordinary urban street
Less than an hour’s drive from the North Korean border, in the Chinese city of Yanji, one of the world’s foremost dinosaur experts is patiently searching for prehistoric bones.
Seen from the air, the midsize city in the northeastern province of Jilin looks like a Legoland of new pink- and blue-roofed buildings, but there’s one long empty lot of exposed rocky hillside – the excavation site.
Palaeontologist Xu Xing, who has named more dinosaur species than any living person, has spent the past two years searching for prehistoric bones in the exposed cliff face at the end of a street of newly built high-rises.
Like many fossil excavation sites in China, this one was discovered by accident.
China’s rapid city building has churned up a mother lode of dinosaur fossils. While bulldozers have unearthed prehistoric sites in many countries, the scale and speed of China’s urbanisation is unprecedented, according to the United Nations Development Programme.
Perhaps no one has seized the scientific opportunity more than Xu, a diligent and unassuming standard-bearer for China’s new prominence in palaeontology. The energetic researcher races between dig sites to collect specimens and further scientists’ understanding of how birds evolved from dinosaurs.