At the end of a street of newly built high-rises in the northern Chinese city of Yanji stands an exposed cliff face, where paleontologists scrape away rock in search of dinosaur bones.
Like many fossil excavation sites in China, this one was discovered by accident.
China’s rapid city building has churned up a lot of dinosaur fossils. While bulldozers have unearthed such sites in many nations, the scale and speed of China’s urbanization is unprecedented, according to the UN Development Program.
Photo: AP
Perhaps no one has seized the scientific opportunity more than Xu Xing (徐星), a diligent and unassuming standard-bearer for China’s new prominence in paleontology.
The energetic researcher has named more dinosaur species than any living paleontologist, racing between dig sites to collect specimens.
Matthew Lamanna, a curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, said Xu is “widely regarded as one of the foremost, if not the foremost, dinosaur paleontologist working in China today.”
Two years ago, Xu’s colleague at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, Jin Changzhu (金昌柱), was visiting family in Yanji when he heard talk of fossils uncovered at a construction site. A preliminary inspection yielded what appeared to be a dinosaur shoulder bone.
Less than an hour’s drive from the North Korean border, the midsize city has been erecting residential blocks quickly.
Seen from a plane, Yanji looks like a Legoland of new pink and blue-roofed buildings, but there is one long empty lot of exposed rocky hillside — the excavation site.
When Xu arrived at Yanji, he recognized the site could fill gaps in the fossil record, noting the relative paucity of bones recovered from the late Cretaceous period.
Xu is now overseeing a team of scientists using picks, chisels and steel needles to study the exposed hillside, where geologic layers resemble a red and gray layer-cake.
The site has yielded partial skeletons of three crocodiles and one sauropod, the giant plant-eating dinosaurs that included some of the world’s largest land animals.
“This is a major feature of paleontology here in China — lots of construction really helps the scientists to find new fossils,” Xu said as he used a needle to remove debris from a partially exposed crocodile skull.
Born in 1969 in China’s western Xinjiang region, Xu did not choose to study dinosaurs. Like most university students of his era, he was assigned a major.
His love for the field grew in graduate school in the 1990s, as feathered dinosaurs recovered from ancient Chinese lake beds drew global attention.
When Xu and Jin discovered fossils in Yanji in 2016, city authorities halted construction on adjacent high-rise buildings, in accordance with a national law.
“The developer was really not happy with me,” said Xu, but the local government has since embraced its newfound claim to fame.
The city is now facilitating Xu’s work and has even built an on-site police station to guard the fossils from theft.
Once the excavation is complete, a museum is planned, to display recovered fossils and photographs of Xu’s team at work.
It is not the first museum to commemorate Xu, whose prodigious fieldwork has taken him across China and resulted in a flurry of articles in top scientific journals.
Toru Sekiyu, a paleontologist from the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in Japan who assisted on the Yanji dig, called his Chinese colleague “a superstar paleontologist,” but Xu is quick to point out the role that good fortune has played in his career.
“To publish papers and discover new species, you need new data — you need new fossils,” he said, adding that finding new species is not something a scientist can plan.
“My experience tells me that you really need luck, besides your hard work. Then you can make some important discoveries,” he said.
With digs in Inner Mongolia, Yunnan, Liaoning and other Chinese provinces, Xu patiently oversees excavations, sometimes chiseling for years before he knows their ultimate significance.
In addition to professional accolades, Xu’s work has attracted attention from schoolchildren in multiple nations, who mail him handwritten notes and crayon drawings of dinosaurs, several of which hang in his Beijing office.
Xu replies to every letter, e-mail and text message with a question about dinosaurs.
“I feel it would be weird or impolite not to,” he said.
However, in an era of social media, Xu has refrained from signing up for WeChat, the dominant messaging platform in China, because “I don’t think I could find time for all the new messages.”
In Yanji, a colleague brings him a large rock with an exposed sauropod vertebrae to examine.
The bone has a spongy texture, which Xu says is a result of the animal’s respiratory system.
He says sauropods breathed using both lungs and distributed air sacs, which can leave an impression in the bones.
Xu uses a brush to flick away dirt to inspect the fossil more closely.
“Basically, we are reconstructing the evolutionary tree of life,” he said. “If you have more species to study, you have more branches on that tree, more information about the history of life on Earth.”
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS