The Zigong dinosaur beds at Dashanpu

The Zigong Dinosaur Museum stands at Dashanpu, northeast of the city of Zigong in Sichuan, on top of the dinosaur bed it was built to show. The Dashanpu site first came to light in 1972 and spans about 70,000 square metres of Middle Jurassic rock in the Shaximiao Formation. Excavation in the 1980s brought out vast quantities of bone, much of it still articulated, and in 1987 the museum opened over the quarry, the first in China built on an actual dinosaur burial site and the first in Asia devoted almost entirely to dinosaurs.

The burial ground is the centrepiece. A dinosaur cemetery found early in the excavations was left exposed inside the building, and from a viewing platform visitors look down on cleaned and prepared vertebral columns and limbs lying in the sandstone; a second, smaller bone bed can be seen from above elsewhere. A writer for Deposits magazine, visiting during the 2010 International Congress on the Jurassic System, called it a Konzentrat-Lagerstätte, a deposit where fossils pile up in great concentrations. Isolated bones and partly articulated skeletons suggest the bodies were carried some way before burial, and preserved skin shows that, in places, conditions held off decay.

The count keeps rising. Zeng Xiaoyun, the museum's curator, told Xinhua that more than 200 specimens of dinosaurs and other vertebrates have come out of the site, 29 species in 26 genera: sauropods, theropods, stegosaurs and basal neornithischians alongside fish, amphibians, turtles, crocodiles, pterosaurs and therapsids. Zeng described it as a Jurassic park, and in 2024 the International Union of Geological Sciences listed it as a Geological Heritage Site. Most known dinosaurs are Upper Jurassic or Cretaceous, so these Middle Jurassic animals fill a gap in the record.

In the main hall the skeletons are mounted as living animals against painted Jurassic scenery: Gasosaurus hunting the small ornithopod Agilisaurus, Yangchuanosaurus crushing one in its jaws, a herd of Agilisaurus walking together, an adult Omeisaurus beside a juvenile. Shunosaurus, Huayangosaurus and the long-spined Gigantspinosaurus are here too, along with a dinosaur named for the township, Dashanpusaurus. A second building, finished in 2023, covers the burial site of Omeisaurus jiaoi in younger Jurassic beds and shows a cross-section of the local rock. The museum claims the largest number of dinosaur fossils in the world and draws up to seven million visitors a year.