Nanjing’s Museum of Paleontology is this month celebrating the 15th anniversary of the opening of its very first exhibition hall, an event which has extra significance given China’s recent discovery of the only Tyrannosaurus Rex (T Rex) fossil footprint in all of Asia.
T Rex was the most famous and horrifying dinosaur ever to walk the surface of the Earth. Yet for a long time, its footprint had not been discovered in Asia. That all changed on 29 July this year, when Chinese and foreign palaeontologists announced that a huge dinosaur footprint had been discovered in Ganzhou (赣州), Jiangxi Province.
The research was conducted by Associate Professor, Xing Lida, of the China University of Geosciences (Beijing), Niu Kecheng, Executive Director of the Yingliang World Natural History Museum, and Martin G. Lockley, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado. An article as to the research was published in the August, 2019, issue of authoritative Chinese academic journal, Science Bulletin, while the discovery itself made the cover of the publication.
Most dinosaur footprints in China are from the early Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods, and footprints from the late Cretaceous are very rare. T Rex occupied the top of the food chain; their numbers were relatively small, and so there are fewer fossils to be found.
The specimen was discovered when a construction team revealed the stone during the course of their work. At that time, the workers saw a “freakish” mark on a huge red sandstone, after which they contacted Niu, saying that the mark looks like a dinosaur or some kind of huge three-toed animal.
The fossil is now housed in the Yingliang World Stone Natural History Museum in Nan’an City, Fujian Province, displayed together with other precious fossil collections that introduce the interesting dinosaur footprint story.
Back in Nanjing, the recent discovery is a pleasant underscore to the city’s Museum of Paleontology in its celebrations marking 15 years since its first exhibition of fossils was opened, one completed while the museum around it was still under construction and one that remains open to visitors to this day.
The Chengjiang Herd Special Exhibition Hall houses 240 specimens of more than 80 species in 12 major categories, that all come from Chengjiang county in Yuxi (玉溪), Yunnan Province. The county has become famous as a lower Cambrian fossil site.
There could not be a better time, therefore, than this October, for a visit to the Nanjing Museum of Paleontology that also provides good explanation, albeit unfortunately only in Chinese, as to the geology of the Nanjing area, in addition to that for its numerous fossil collections.
