Giant Dinosaur Fossil Found In China

Chinese researchers found a brand-new dinosaur fossil that’s totally different from anything they’ve ever found before! It’s from a long time ago in the Early Jurassic era. They found it in 2015 in an area named the Lufeng Formation in Yunnan Province, China. They named this new dino Xingxiulong quorum, and it’s a sauropod—a huge, long-necked dino—of the Early Jurassic. The rocks that they discovered are from the Hettangian Age, which occurred between 201.3 million and 199.3 million years ago.

The scientists believe that another dino they refer to as L. wangi could be the largest non-sauropod sauropodomorph (a long word for a dino related to sauropods) discovered there. The Lufeng Formation is a dinosaur bonanza—it already yielded fossils of seven other kinds of early sauropodomorphs. Fine-grained sediments in the region allowed for the preservation of the animal skeletons, study lead author Qian-Nan Zhang, a vertebrate paleontology scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, told Live Science. The river and lake deposits of clays, silt, and sand that formed the terrain protected the dinosaur fossils from erosion. Sedimentary minerals filled up the bone framework, proceeding to fossilize.
Chinese researchers discovered a pretty awesome, Dinosaur fossils It dates back to the Early Jurassic time period. They found it again in 2015 in a location in China called the Lufeng Formation in Yunnan Province. They believed they would call this dino Xingxiulong yueorum, and it’s that huge, long-necked dinosaur called a sauropod. The rocks they found it in were from an age called the Hettangian Age, which was, like, between 201.3 and 199.3 million years ago.

The scientists also think that another dinosaur they named L. Wangi may be the largest non-sauropod sauropodomorph ever found there. The Lufeng Formation is full of dinosaur fossils—they’ve already found bones of seven other species of early sauropodomorphs there! Qian-Nan Zhang, a paleontologist and study lead author, said the tiny grains of dirt in that area preserved the fossils. She works at an organization called the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The clays, sand, and silt from the ancient lakes and rivers covered the dinosaur bones and preserved them from erosion, she was quoted by Live Science as saying. Then minerals from the ground got deposited on the bones and turned them into fossils.