Zigong Dinosaur Fossils Museum

Zigong Dinosaur Fossil Museum is in south Sichuan province ,about 200km away from Chengdu .The Zigong Dinosaur Fossil Museum is located in Dashanpu of Zigong City. Today , Zigong Dinosaur Fossil Museum is China's first museum located on the actual burial site of dinosaurs. .

Zigong is a city famous for salt production, and it is also an important dinosaur fossil base in China. There are more than forty locations within the city where dinosaur fossils of different eras have been found. A very considerable amount of fossilized dinosaurs has been excavated here and other vertebrate fossils have been found as well on the same sites.

The concentration of buried fossil remains at Zigong is greatest at Dashanpu . A great quantity and diversity of types is found here, including specimens that are quite rare and relatively well preserved. This place is eleven kilometers to the northeast of Zigong City. It was discovered in 1972.The fossils are in a sandy layer of the Meso-Jurassic period, dating back to 160,000,000 years ago. In an area of around 3,000 square meters, more than 100 individual fossilized dinosaurs have been excavated, among which some thirty are complete or relatively complete dinosaur skeletons.

Especially valuable is a group of dinosaur skulls. At present, only around twenty percent of excavated dinosaurs in the world belong to the Jurassic period, and most of these are from the late Jurassic, lacking the early and middle stages that show how dinosaurs evolved. At Zigong, especially at Dashanpu, the fossils come mostly from the early and middle periods, soThe newly built Zigong Dinosaur Museum mostly exhibits fossils of dinosaurs that have been excavated from the immediate site.