Toothy beauty. This metre-long skull of
Allosaur relative Yangchuanosaurus is
one of the best preserved skulls of a large
carnivorous dinosaur in the world.I
F YOU’RE A BIT like me and
prone to geeky tendencies, then
walking into the display space
and open dig site at the Lufeng
Dinosaur quarry in China’s Yunnan
Province is an experience you will
never forget. It takes your eyes a little
while to adjust in the cool and dim,
hangar-like space, but once they have,
it’s clear that what’s exhibited here
is something very special. All around
you are great numbers of dinosaurs.
Not models or casts, but carefully
reconstructed, largely complete fossil
skeletons of about 70 giant reptiles.
They’re arranged in great herds and
atmospherically lit from below, so
some seem to float over you as you
wander among the columns beneath.
Most of these skeletons are those of
primitive prosauropods, ancestors of
the giant sauropods (such as Diplodocus
and Diamantinasaurus), which would
later reach lengths of more than 35m.
The Lufeng specimens were yet to
develop the same titanic proportions,
but already evolution had begun to
elongate their necks and sculpt them
into the more familiar sauropod
body plan. And although these
prosauropods spent some time on all
fours, they were still partly bipedal,
standing on their hind limbs to reach
into the trees for fresh shoots.
The fossils displayed here at the
World Dinosaur Valley in Lufeng,
about 60km west of Yunnan’s capital
Kunming, are the dinosaur equivalent
of the Terracotta Army, itself dug up
in the 1970s in Shaanxi Province.
Like the famous warriors, Lufeng’s
fossil treasures are arranged in an
open dig site and display space, but
the dinosaurs were buried much
earlier than the third century BC. In
fact, the oldest, such as 9m herbivore
Lufengosaurus, are more thanBONES
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UPCOMING EXPEDITIONJanuary –February 2014 99