A Muslim farmer in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region had never
imagined in his wildest dreams that he could become the finder of a
"national treasure", especially one whose excavation was televised
live to all Chinese people by China Central Television (CCTV) on
Saturday afternoon.
Ma Yun had been catching hedgehogs on a hill near Lingwu City in
April 2004, when he came across a "brown stone", some 20
centimeters in diameter. He believed that the stone resembled an
enormous "animal limb". None of the people he dragged to the spot
seemed convinced, until five months later he contacted the Lingwu
Bureau of Cultural Relics and was told the "stone" could be
something more precious: a dinosaur fossil.
"I had guessed that," said the contented farmer, who was so
excited to appear on TV that he cut his long hair.
It was the first fossil excavation broadcast live in China.
Excitingly, while these fossils of a new dinosaur were being
unearthed in Ningxia Hui's city of Lingwu, at the same moment in Xinjiang's Changji Hui Autonomous Prefecture,
Asia's largest Mamenchisaurus was being excavated.?
"We made this live broadcast because these fossils are so
precious," said Xu Xing, 37-year-old archaeologist and researcher
with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology
of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), who was invited as a
guest by CCTV.
Eight sauropods, or huge, long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs
living some 160 million years ago, were unearthed in a 3,000-square
meter area in Lingwu, said Professor Xu.
Twenty-eight teeth lay in order on the ground and Xu noted that
a skull might be underneath. A 1.1-meter-long backbone has also
been discovered, the biggest ever excavated in Asia and yet more
fossils could be found at the spot, said experts.
Professor Xu, who has personally named 15 new dinosaur species,
believes that the dinosaur is a sub-species of diplodocus, mainly
found in the southern hemisphere in places like Tanzania and
Argentina, yet some have appeared in North America.
Discovery of the species in Asia could support the Continental
Drift Theory, according to which the African, American and Asian
continents used to be connected.
?
The fossils could also help experts better understand geological
changes in northwest China, as Xu noticed some bones had been
washed away in this arid area. He believed that the spot might have
been a delta millions of years ago.
Sauropods were the Jurassic's finest specimens, growing up to 40
meters long and weighing over 100 tons.
Questions are being raised over death of the mammoth creature.
"It is rare to find so many dinosaurs, of varied sizes, dead
together," said Mo Jinyou, professor with the Guangxi Natural
Museum who helped with the excavation in Lingwu. Mo guessed that
the dinosaurs' deaths could have been caused by "unnatural
reasons".
The fossils will be preserved on the spot, where a museum shall
be built, according to Wang Jun, vice director of Lingwu's
Publicity Department.
Meanwhile, a national geological park featuring wood and
dinosaur fossils opened in Changji in Xinjiang on Saturday, where
the largest dinosaur in Asia has just been unearthed.
The dinosaur, 35 meters in length, is five meters longer than
Asia's previous largest, which was discovered by a Sino-Canadian
archaeological team in 1987 and is displayed in the Natural Museum
in Beijing.
In 1902, China dug up its first dinosaur fossil in northeastern
Heilongjiang Province. In 1979, a cluster of
dinosaur fossils was found in southwestern Sichuan Province's Zigong City, where ?a
dinosaur museum now houses the complete fossils of more than 100
dinosaurs.
At present, the amount of dinosaur fossils unearthed in China is
the third largest in the world, having been classified into over
100 categories.
Experts are asking the public to suggest names for the
dinosaurs. Many people believed that the dinosaur in Lingwu should
be named after the discoverer Ma Yun. While Ma Yun has named his
son "Xiao Long", the name of a kind of dinosaur, he noted that his
discovery was rather of the tall kind.
(Xinhua News Agency August 28, 2006)
