The 'Tamba Dragon' Has Japanese Dinosaur Hunters All Fired Up

摘要

Haruo Saegusa's 17 years of encounters with amateur fossil hunters didn't prepare him for the surprise he was in for on 9 August 2006. Ordinarily, he says, people who bring specimens to the Museum of Nature and Human Activities in Sanda, in central Japan's Hyogo Prefecture, suffer from "fossil mania," imagining that oddly shaped rocks or round stones they've found are dinosaur bones or eggs. So when a pair of elderly men showed up with two objects pulled from the bank of the Sasayama River, Saegusa, a paleontologist at the Sanda museum, had low expectations. But the fossils were bona fide. "I was astonished," he says.