China leads the world in dinosaur discoveries

“It's not just dinosaurs, but fossil mammals, too,” said famed dinosaur hunter, Bob Bakker, curator of the Houston Museum of Natural Science. “They have great stuff: complete saber-tooth cat skeletons, three-toed horses. The Chinese have magnificent fossil rhinos.”

As far as dinosaurs go, University of Pennsylvania paleontologist, Peter Dodson, keeps a running tally of the number discovered in different countries.

“I knew China had been close to the U.S.,” he said. “I discovered to my surprise, chagrin, amazement that as of last summer, China not only had already surpassed the U.S., but shot past it. I honestly didn't think we would ever relinquish our position, but things have happened so fast in China.”

As of 1990, for example, a total of 64types of dinosaurs had been found in the U.S; 44 in Mongolia; 36 in China.

In 2006, the U.S. hit 108, China was second at 101, Mongolia had 61.

Today: 132 have been found in China, 108 in the U.S. and 65 in Mongolia.

“I had a Chinese graduate student,” Dodson said of his former student, You Hai-Lu. “In 2003, he accomplished a feat that nobody in the history of dinosaur paleontology had done. He named five new dinosaurs in one year.”

Some 365 new dinosaurs have been discovered and named in the last 20 years alone, more than in the previous 130 years. About 650 types are now identified, with an average of 25 new ones found each year.

To be sure, China has a rich history of paleontological finds going back to the 1920s and the work of C.C. Young, a famed Chinese paleontologist educated in Germany. The “Peking Man,” an early example of homo erectus, believed at the time to be about 500,000 years old, was found near Beijing in 1923. Studies in 2009 by Chinese and American researchers now suggest that those fossils may be 250,000 years older than originally thought.

But the more recent finds are the result of vast fossil deposits being unearthed from at least nine major sites across China. The creatures ranging from 100-foot-long sauropods to the feathered birds studied at KU represent every major dinosaur period.

From Yunnan Province in the south come Triassic species, 248 million to 208 million years old. Huge Jurassic types, 208 million to 146 million years old, emerge out of Xinjang in the west. Liaoning Province, in northeast China, produces countless Cretaceous creatures, 146 million to 65 million years ago — including a treasure trove of feathered fossils.

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