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From Middle Kingdom to dinosaur kingdom

Visitors walk by a replica of the Omeisaurus Tienfuensis, a 20m-long and 9m-high dinosaur, the second largest found in Asia, discovered on a site where the Zigong Dinosaur Museum now stands, in Sichuan Province , on April 30. PHOTOS: AFP

All through China's tumultuous experiments with first communism and then market economics, Zhou Shiwu has stayed devoted to the study of a period 150 million years ago when dinosaurs ruled the earth.

The 64-year-old paleontologist has played a pivotal role in some of the most eye-catching excavations in recent decades, and now his hope is for China to become recognized as an emerging dinosaur superpower.

"Foreigners don't fully understand just how important China is in dinosaur research," he said. "We're a real dinosaur kingdom."

Southwestern China, Zhou's home for the past four decades, is one of the most fertile areas for dinosaur digs on the planet, and explorations have taken place there on and off since 1915.

The area again proved its richness this spring when a retired woman took her grandson for a stroll along the banks of the Jialing River near Chongqing municipality and stumbled upon an almost complete 17m-long fossil.

With the summer floods approaching, researchers had a 20-day window of opportunity to excavate the fossil before it was immersed, working frantically as Chongqing residents arrived by the thousands to witness the digging.

"In the end we worked in shifts 24 hours a day to finish the work in time," said Zhang Renxuan, deputy curator of the Chongqing Museum of Natural History. "We put up sand bags around the fossil to protect it from the rising water."

The fossil turned out to have a neck several times longer than that of a modern giraffe and may hold important clues about the evolution of dinosaurs in what is now China.

It is just one in a series of sensational Chinese finds which have not only put the country on the scientific map but also helped bring forth generations of dedicated local dinosaur researchers.

"It's like being a chef," said Zhang, speaking with contagious enthusiasm about the smorgasbord of fossils he and his colleagues work with. "If you don't have the ingredients, you won't be able to cook good food."

Nowhere are China's dinosaur relics more abundant than at Zigong, a city in Sichuan Province a three-hour drive from Chongqing.

Here, dinosaurs lay down to die during the Jurassic age, the nearly unfathomably long span of time that began 210 million years ago and ended 70 million years later.

They formed a cemetery estimated to cover 30,000m2, of which only one tenth has been investigated so far.

"The discovery of this place was entirely fortuitous, coincidental," said Peng Guangzhao, the vice director of the Zigong Dinosaur Museum, which has now been built on top of the site and is Asia's biggest.

A team of geologists first chanced upon the extraordinarily plentiful fossils at Zigong in 1972, but they were ignored as China was caught in the middle of the ravages of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

Seven years later, construction workers planned to build a parking lot over the site, and were only stopped because paleontologists from the Chinese Academy of Science happened to visit the area.

"If they hadn't passed by, all might have been destroyed," Peng said.

Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) himself visited the museum last year, reflecting the way dinosaur research has now been given the official stamp of approval as a worthy pursuit.

This was not always so. During the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Shiwu, the 64-year-old dinosaur hunter, was branded an "intellectual" -- then a term of abuse -- and forced to spend most of his time in political study sessions.

"The biggest problem during the Cultural Revolution was we couldn't do any real work. If we wanted to do research, we had to do it stealthily at night in our rooms. Like thieves," he said.

"Once the Cultural Revolution was over, I had to work all the harder to make up for lost time," he said.

The era of fierce political struggles is long gone, and Zhou can now express his passion for dinosaurs in elegant classical-style poems that not long ago would have been seen as decadent remnants of feudal society.

But amid the unprecedented academic freedom, researchers are facing new and perhaps equally serious challenges, this time from the market forces.

China's population of 1.3 billion have surrendered to a rush to get rich, and dinosaur science sometimes has to pay the price.

With a thriving global market in dinosaur fossils, many farmers eke out an extra income by selling their finds illegally to collectors, travelers and traders.

The Zigong Dinosaur Museum seeks to counter the temptation by offering rewards, sometimes up to several thousand yuan (several hundred US dollars), to farmers passing their finds on to the researchers.

But the trade goes on unabated, especially in the northeast of the country, despite government attempts to clamp down harshly on infringers.

"The punishment depends on how grave the crime has been," Zhou said. "Some have been executed."

Another problem is that property developers occasionally decide to ignore dinosaur finds, researchers said.

Either they do not realize the importance of what they have come across, or they only understand the scientific value too well and fear costly delays in their projects.

If politics and the market forces permit it, there is work left for generations of Chinese paleontologists.

One question is why dinosaur eggs are curiously absent in southwest China, despite the region's abundance of fossils.

This is in stark contrast to central China's Henan Province where eggs are found -- and traded illegally -- in great numbers.

It could be that dinosaur eggs of the Jurassic, when the fauna of southwestern China peaked, had thinner shells than later periods, causing them to vanish before they could fossilize, scientists speculate.

Or the explanation could be the Jurassic-era dinosaurs hatched their young inside their wombs.

"It's important for us to solve this question," Peng said. "It will help us understand how dinosaurs behaved and interacted with the environment."

Most intriguingly, there may be large accumulations of fossils, perhaps even as vast as the Zigong cemetery, still waiting to be discovered.

"We can't rule out there are other dinosaur sites around Sichuan province which are just as interesting," Peng said.
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