Dinosaur bones find is world's biggest, says China

7,600 fossils about 100m years old discovered in Zhucheng
Scientists in China say they have discovered the worlds largest dinosaur fossil site
Scientists in China say they have discovered the world's largest dinosaur fossil site in the eastern province of Shandong. Photograph: Imaginechina /Imaginechina

China claims to have found the world's biggest deposit of dinosaur bones in the old city of Zhucheng in Shandong province on the country's eastern coast.

Workers digging along a 300 metre slope on the outskirts of the city unearthed a densely packed layer of fossils that could be more than 100m years old. The state news agency Xinhua said that 7,600 samples had now been discovered, mostly dating from the late Cretaceous period, the era when dinosaurs are believed to have become extinct.

Zhucheng has become an important site for China's dinosaur hunters, with the world's largest remnant of the duck-billed hadrosaur discovered near the city more than 20 years ago. The city's unique importance to the world of palaeontology emerged in 1964, when oil prospectors working for the state geological bureau stumbled on a collection of dinosaur fossils during a routine dig.

Xinhua said the new findings included the skull of a large ceratopsian, a beaked flying dinosaur, along with bones thought to belong to the club-tailed ankylosaurus.

A number of important fossil discoveries have been made in China from a wide range of geological ages, with the remains of oviraptors, sauropods, plateosaurs, stegasaurs and hadrosaurs found in Mesozoic deposits stretching from Shandong in the east to Xinjiang in the remote west. The caudipterix, elaborately plumaged and believed to be the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds, is also one of the country's most important discoveries. 

Until recently there was a thriving black market in dinosaur eggs, with poorly paid labourers selling off their finds to foreign collectors.

Zhao Xijin, the China Academy of Sciences palaeontologist who has been leading the Zhucheng project, told Xinhua that in normal circumstances there is only a one in a million chance that a dinosaur bone will form a fossil. He said that during the late Cretaceous period Zhucheng must have been submerged under shallow water, making the region fertile enough to grow copious amounts of trees, weeds and grasses that would have enabled vegetarian species like the hadrosaur to thrive.

Experts suggest that a massive population of dinosaurs marauded across China's landscape from about 235m years ago, but it is still an especially challenging environment when it comes to finding fossils. Old calcium-rich "flying dragon" bones continue to be ground up and used in traditional village remedies for muscle cramps and other minor ailments.