RE: PALEONEWS:China to Build First Dinosaur Park in Yunnan

["Thomas R. Holtz, Jr." <tholtz@geol.umd.edu>]

In the Trying-to-nip-new-dinosaur-mythology-in-the-bud Department...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-dinosaur@usc.edu [mailto:owner-dinosaur@usc.edu]On Behalf Of
> Betty Cunningham
>
> China to Build First Dinosaur Park in Yunnan
>
> "Chuanjie has now passed Utah in the United States and Zigong in
> southwest China's Sichuan Province to become the largest burial ground
> of dinosaurs in the world," he said.
>
> During the recent excavation, Chinese archeologists unearthed fossils of
> eight dinosaurs, which lay crisscross over a 220-square- meter area of
> mountain slope in Chuanjie. A 20-meter long carnivore was found on top
> of a seven-meter-long herbivore -- the natural enemy of the carnivore.

Before anyone gets all excited about 66' long carnivores, this is almost
certainly just a mistranslation of "A 20-meter long herbivore was found on
top of a seven-meter-long carnivore -- the natural enemy of the herbivore".

>"It is rare that the two kinds of dinosaurs died together," said Pan
> Shigang, an official with the Lufeng Dinosaur Museum.

Rare, yes, but not unheard of.  Witness, for example, the Felch Quarry 1 in
the Morrison of Garden Park, Colorado: within a few meters of each other
have been found excellent skeletons of _Ceratosaurus_, _Allosaurus_,
_Diplodocus_, _Stegosaurus_, and more fragmentary remains of other dinosaus.

                Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
                Vertebrate Paleontologist
Department of Geology           Director, Earth, Life & Time Program
University of Maryland          College Park Scholars
                College Park, MD  20742
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/tholtz.htm
http://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/eltsite
Phone:  301-405-4084    Email:  tholtz@geol.umd.edu
Fax (Geol):  301-314-9661       Fax (CPS-ELT): 301-314-7843>