Dinosaur Kingpin Opens Fossil Bonanza to Science

摘要

When Zheng Xiaoting read a report in Science 2 years ago arguing that Archaeopteryx and an ancient bird unearthed in China, Confuciusornis, were poor flyers, he was dubious. The Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature here has more fossils of Confuciusornis, a crow-sized bird from the Cretaceous period 120 million years ago, than everywhere else in the world put together. Zheng, the museum's director, acquired every one of Tianyu's 606 Confuciusornis specimens himself.