Spectacular fossil site found in China

Jeff Poling

An international team of paleontologists announced Thursday, April 25, 1997, at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Science, that a trove of spectacular fossils have been discovered in a remote region of northeast China.

Among the hundreds of major finds at the site are the first fossilized internal organs of dinosaurs and the first fossil of a dinosaur containing a mammal it may have eaten.

Specimens from Liaoning Province, near the village of Beipiaon, also include finds already announced to the world, including the oldest beaked bird Confuciusornis, the maned, possibly feathered, dinosaur Sinosauropteryx, the oldest modern bird Liaoningornis, and many other species of dinosaurs, mammals, insects and plants. The description of a bird called Protarchaeopteryx, considered by the Chinese to be more primitive and more dinosaurian than the oldest true bird currently known, Archaeopteryx, is currently in press.

Most of the fossils are preserved in exquisite detail, including impressions of soft body parts such as feathers and organs which are rarely preserved. The Liaoning deposits are described as a lacustrine deposit, or a deposit formed with fine volcanic ash. Scientists surmise that a brief catastrophe, possibly a volcanic eruption, killed and buried everything there, possibly even bacteria. It preserves a possibly complete record of life there at the instant the catastrophe hit in the late Jurassic or early Cretaceous.

The team also announced an agreement by China to permit international cooperation in the site's study.

1. uncredited. 1997. Wealth of dinosaur fossils uncovered in China. The Columbus Dispatch, 25 April, sec. A, 3.