Among the many provinces in China, Sichuan is a more special one, and this special feature is mainly reflected in a city below it, which is Zigong City. Zigong City is a very magical city, and its magic comes from a title that is related to a long-extinct animal. Dinosaurs were born here a long time ago, so Zigong City has a title - the land of dinosaurs, and from this title you can see the city's long history. It is precisely because of the title of "Dinosaur Town" in Zigong City that it has been rated as a national historical city.
Sichuan Zigong is an important dinosaur fossil production area in China. The continental strata of the Jurassic period (135 million years to 210 million years ago) in this area are quite developed, and dinosaur fossils are buried in the early and middle Jurassic land formations, and the dinosaur fossils in this period are the weak links in the world's dinosaur research, so the dinosaur fossils in Zigong provide a wealth of key original data for the world to study the evolution of dinosaurs.
Zigong Dinosaur Museum:
The excavation site of dinosaur fossils in Dashanpu, a northeastern suburb of Zigong City, is 11 kilometers away from Zigong City. It is another large-scale on-site museum in China after the Terracotta Warriors and Horses Pit of Qin Shi Huang. The first phase of the museum covers an area of 25,000 square meters, with a construction area of 6,000 square meters, and three parts: branch building, green area and outbuilding. The main building has a fossil burial hall, a central hall, a fossil shelf exhibition hall, a lecture hall and a dinosaur ecological environment hall. The dinosaur burial site is 1900 square meters, and the skeletons of various dinosaurs can be seen interwoven and distributed in the sandstone layers that extend nearly horizontally, which is the epitome of a huge dinosaur cemetery. In the shelves hall, there is a combination of nearly 10 meters high "Tianfu Emei Dragon" and a number of dinosaur restoration skeletons, (Hundreds of dinosaur and companion fossils excavated by Dashanpu constitute a complete "dinosaur fauna".) These include 3 orders, 11 orders, and 15 families of genera, ranging from terrestrial, aquatic, amphibians to airborne archorphytes; herbivorous long cervical sauropods up to 20 meters long, ferocious carnivorous dinosaurs, and a large and intact number of short-cervical sauropods, as well as ornithischiae that are only 14 meters long. The most precious are the world's earliest excavations of middle Jurassic stegosaurs and the first discovery of pterosaurs, filling a gap in the evolutionary history of dinosaurs.
Zigong Dinosaur Museum
Zigong Museum is known in the world as the National Dinosaur Park of the United States and the Canadian Dinosaur Park, and is collectively known as the world's three major dinosaur museums. Zigong Dinosaur Museum is located in Dashanpu, Zigong City, Sichuan Province.
Located in Dashanpu Town, about 11 kilometers northeast of Zigong City, Sichuan Province, the Dashanpu Dinosaur Fossil Group Site is a site rich in 160 million years old Middle Jurassic dinosaurs and other vertebrate fossils, the most important dinosaur fossil burial place in China, and one of the most important paleontological fossil burial sites in the world. The site was first discovered in 1972, first excavated in 1977, to obtain a relatively complete sauropod dinosaur skeleton, and in 1979 due to infrastructure construction fossils were exposed in large quantities. From 1979 to 1984, three large-scale clean-ups and excavations were organized, and tens of thousands of fossil skeleton specimens of more than 200 individuals of dinosaurs and other vertebrates were obtained within a range of about 2800 square meters, from which 21 species of 18 genera, such as dinosaur fish, amphibians, turtles and turtles, crocodiles, pterosaurs, and mammal-like reptiles, have been studied and named. It is estimated that the burial area of the entire fossil cluster is about 17,000 square meters, and the fossil skeleton is more than 100,000 pieces, which is known as the "dinosaur cemetery". In the mid-1980s, China's first large-scale dinosaur site museum, the Zigong Dinosaur Museum, was built on the site.
The site of dashanpu dinosaur fossil group has the characteristics of huge fossil collection, complete categories, concentrated burial and complete preservation. As a rare natural historical heritage, the fossils it produces not only have important scientific education and tourism value, but also fill the gap in the lack of dinosaur fossil materials in the early and middle Jurassic in the history of dinosaur evolution, and have great scientific value for the study of the phylogenetic evolution, physiological characteristics and living environment of dinosaurs and their related paleontuna.