Dinosaur village offers new body of evidence

Scientists are conducting research on a site where an earlier generation of paleontologists had first begun their work, with the hope of unveiling more of the story from the Late Cretaceous period, Cheng Yingqi reports

The village of Jingangkou, 10 km southeast of Laiyang, Shandong province, is like any farming community. Houses dot the landscape of green patchwork fields. Vegetables grow in the lush soil. But the mountains surrounding the village hold an archeological treasure - large bleached bones. After two months of digging in the red mountainous terrain, paleontologists have excavated more than 200 dinosaur bones since July. "The soil of Laiyang has preserved the most complete remains of dinosaurs living from the Late Cretaceous period (100 to 66 million years ago)," said Wang Xiaolin, a professor of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"And what makes this site so important is that it is one of the few sites that are rich both in dinosaurs and in dinosaur eggs."