Boy, 6, hailed for dinosaur footprint discovery

Yang Zheyu, a 6-year-old kindergarten student in Chengdu, Sichuan province, is a celebrity.

In his English and painting classes outside his kindergarten, strangers recognize him. When he walks through the residential quarter where he and his parents live, neighbors ask for his autograph.

That's because the media have hailed him as the country's youngest discoverer of dinosaur footprints.

Zheyu, who was born in December 2014, visited his maternal grandfather's home in Tongjiang county with his parents during the seven-day National Day holiday last year to see "strange footprints".

His grandfather, Gou Taixiang, 56, a doctor, had told Zheyu that footprints like those of a chicken could be found on a gigantic stone slab in his mountainous home village of Chaoyang.

At around 2 pm on Oct 1, Zheyu visited the slab with his parents and grandfather. Because the stone was covered with vines, the grandfather used a machete to clear them away. After the dust was swept away with a cypress twig, five footprints could be seen.

"My son asked me to send photos of the footprints to Xing Lida," said Gou Fengqiong, the boy's mother. Xing is an associate professor at China University of Geosciences in Beijing. She left a message on Weibo.

"Xing Lida replied the next day and said he would head for Tongjiang on Oct 9," said Gou who was a physician before becoming a full-time mother.

Xing, a paleontologist, reached Chaoyang village with two students and soon identified the strange footprints as those of a theropod dinosaur.

Each footprint is about 35 centimeters long and has three toes. They belonged to a dinosaur about 4 meters long, he said.

It was the first discovery of dinosaur footprints from the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic Era on the northern margin of the Sichuan Basin. The prints mean that dinosaurs were active there about 100 million years ago, Xing said.

Zheyu — who was scared to tears when he was 2 years old at the sight of dinosaur replicas moving and opening their mouths at an amusement park in Chengdu, Sichuan province — acquired new interest in the beasts after the coronavirus outbreak.

"I took an online course on dinosaurs taught by Xing Lida and learned how to identify dinosaur footprints, about which species ran fast and which were the toughest fighters," his mother said.

According to Yang Yao, a 27-year-old teacher at the Fortune International Kindergarten who has taught young Zheyu for three years, the child loves science and his capacity for observation is greater than that of his peers.