Dear Kitty. Some blog

December 31, 2008

World’s biggest dinosaur discovery in China? [Reptiles, Biology] — Administrator @ 2:17 pm


This Associated Press video says about itself:

Experts in China’s Liaoning province discovered a new species of dinosaur. They and their colleagues at Brazil’s National Museum in Rio De Janeiro believe the pterodactyl or flying reptile is one of the smallest ever found.
Pterosaurs are not really `dinosaurs`.

From British daily The Guardian

Dinosaur bones find is world’s biggest, says China

7,600 fossils about 100m years old discovered in Zhucheng

* David Stanway in Beijing
* Tuesday 30 December 2008

China claims to have found the world’s biggest deposit of dinosaur bones in the old city of Zhucheng in Shandong province on the country’s eastern coast.

Workers digging along a 300 metre slope on the outskirts of the city unearthed a densely packed layer of fossils that could be more than 100m years old. The state news agency Xinhua said that 7,600 samples had now been discovered, mostly dating from the late Cretaceous period, the era when dinosaurs are believed to have become extinct.

Zhucheng has become an important site for China’s dinosaur hunters, with the world’s largest remnant of the duck-billed hadrosaur discovered near the city more than 20 years ago. The city’s unique importance to the world of palaeontology emerged in 1964, when oil prospectors working for the state geological bureau stumbled on a collection of dinosaur fossils during a routine dig.

Xinhua said the new findings included the skull of a large ceratopsian, a beaked flying dinosaur, along with bones thought to belong to the club-tailed ankylosaurus.

A number of important fossil discoveries have been made in China from a wide range of geological ages, with the remains of oviraptors, sauropods, plateosaurs, stegasaurs [sic; stegosaurs] and hadrosaurs found in Mesozoic deposits stretching from Shandong in the east to Xinjiang in the remote west. The caudipterix, elaborately plumaged and believed to be the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds, is also one of the country’s most important discoveries.

Pterosaurs are not really `flying dinosaurs`.

Long-Necked Dinos Hung Their Heads: here. And here. And here.

The ankylosaur Edmontonia: here.

Estimating Impact Forces of Tail Club Strikes by Ankylosaurid Dinosaurs: here.

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