"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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