The f irst references
to ‘dragon bones’ date
to the Western Jin
Dynasty (265-371 AD).
few international sites that have large
open digs with partially exposed
fossils – others include Dinosaur
Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada,
and Dinosaur National Monument in
Colorado and Utah, USA. Australia’s
Dinosaur Stampede National
Monument at Lark Quarry in
Queensland is spectacular in its own
way – it has 4000 dinosaur footprints
arrayed over an area of 210sq.m – but
no fossil bones have been found there.
The discovery of dinosaurs in
Lufeng in the 1930s has a link to
World War II and the Japanese
occupation of China. When
Japanese troops invaded in 1937,
many universities and research
institutes relocated to the south-
west, to provinces such as Yunnan
and Sichuan, which were still under
Chinese control. Because China had
lost access to its major east-coast
ports, it was forced to build a road
to bring in supplies from British-
administrated Burma. This ran
through the Lufeng Basin, and it was
here in 1938 that an assistant to (the
now late) Chinese palaeontologist,
C. C. Young, first heard reports of
‘dragon bones’ found by road workers.
In the following years, a great number
of dinosaurs were found by geologists
led by Young, particularly primitive
sauropods such as Lufengosaurus.
But the fossils here are not limited
to the Early Jurassic; other layers
reveal later dinosaurs, with Lufeng
continuing to yield interesting fossils
today. In the last few decades, a
Middle Jurassic bone bed that covers
just 3000sq.m has yielded 28 dinosaur
skeletons including the giant 27m
sauropod Chuanjiesaurus, one of the
largest dinosaurs known from Asia.
Despite the new discoveries, and
the fact that hundreds more dinosaurs
are thought to remain in the ground
here, the Chinese government has
actually requested that the experts
in Lufeng put a hold on what theyare digging up, instead prioritising
the preservation of what they already
have. “If we find too many we will
have trouble preserving them and
making enough space. It’s better
to slow down the rate of discovery
and get everything we already have
well preserved,” says Wang. Having
more dinosaur fossils than you know
what to do with is in stark contrast
to parts of Australia, where experts
sometimes have to puzzle over just a
few fragments of weathered bone.S
IMILARLY spectacular to Lufeng
is the dinosaur museum in
Zigong, 170km south-east of
Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan
Province. The first written references
to ‘dragon bones’ (very probably
dinosaur fossils) in Chinese literature
date to the Western Jin Dynasty
(265–371 AD), and refer to their
location as on the banks of a river in
Sichuan. Dinosaur fossils in general
may have been the origin of the
myth of the dragon in China, and
it’s possible that fossils of the beaked
dinosaur Protoceratops from Mongolia,
may likewise have given birth to theAUSTR ALIAN GEOGR APHIC SOCIETY
UPCOMING EXPEDITIONJanuary –February 2014 101