Seven kilometres northeast of Zigong in Sichuan, quarrying in the Middle Jurassic Shaximiao Formation through the 1980s hit one of the densest dinosaur bone beds ever found, with skeletons still articulated rather than scattered. Rather than empty it, China built the museum over the quarry in 1987, the first in Asia devoted almost entirely to dinosaurs, so the main exhibit is the excavation face itself with the bones where they lie. Omeisaurus, Huayangosaurus, Yangchuanosaurus, Gigantspinosaurus and Xiaosaurus are all mounted here, and a dinosaur named for the township, Dashanpusaurus, came out of the same rock. A second hall opened in 2023 over a later Omeisaurus jiaoi dig, with a cross section of the deposit.
A Middle Jurassic bone bed left lying in the rock · Middle Jurassic
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
China
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