[Explanation] Hello everyone, I am Liu Xianglin, a reporter from China News Agency. Today we came to Sichuan and Chongqing to jointly build the Fossil Restoration Center of Chongqing Key Laboratory of Co-evolution of Paleontology and Paleoenvironment. Here we follow the director of the laboratory on behalf of Hui, let's talk about dinosaurs and other paleontological topics that everyone is interested in.
[Concurrent] Dai Hui, Director of Chongqing Key Laboratory of Co-evolution of Paleontology and Paleoenvironment Co-evolution in Sichuan and Chongqing
There are several conditions for the formation of dinosaur fossils. I will summarize a few. The first dinosaur will die in the right place.
Dinosaurs died relatively far away from the water source. After it died on land, scavengers and the like ate its bones and meat, and the bones were damaged, so it was not protected as a fossilized entity.
So where is it going to die?
Dying near the water, then our flood, our currents bring the next sediment to cover it up quickly so that our scavengers, or carnivores, don't eat it.
After the second covering, it needs a crustal movement to press it down. After the environment of high temperature and high pressure, it will perform a metasomatism with our rocks. After the composition of our bones and our rocks are replaced, it becomes A rock composition.
After a long period of time, it will slowly become our fossil.
[Explanation] It's amazing.
Definitely can't touch this.
why?
How can fossils be touched by hand.
Isn't this fossil stone?
[Concurrent] Dai Hui, Director of Chongqing Key Laboratory of Co-evolution of Paleontology and Paleoenvironment Co-evolution in Sichuan and Chongqing
Is such that.
That is to say, under normal circumstances, our important paleontological fossils are touched with gloves, or to take it or the like.
But you can see our dinosaur fossils, and they are exactly what we just said.
This is a stone. It is indeed very petrified. It is similar to our rock, and its hardness is very high.
Usually, when we are good at touching it occasionally, or when we restore the fossil, we often do not wear gloves, and the mechanic is good at touching it, so that it can be repaired more finely.
In fact, the damage of hand touch to our dinosaur fossils is actually very small.
[Concurrent] Dai Hui, Director of Chongqing Key Laboratory of Co-evolution of Paleontology and Paleoenvironment Co-evolution in Sichuan and Chongqing
This is a dinosaur bone, but not a keel as we call it in traditional Chinese medicine.
What we call keels in traditional Chinese medicine is actually the fossils of our mammals.
You can see that the bones of dinosaurs are actually a complete rock, that is to say, how can this rock be used as medicine?
Putting this stone into the medicine means mixing some stones and sand in our traditional Chinese medicine.
So it is not the keel as we call it in traditional Chinese medicine.
[Concurrent] Dai Hui, Director of Chongqing Key Laboratory of Co-evolution of Paleontology and Paleoenvironment Co-evolution in Sichuan and Chongqing
Why do these dinosaur fossils have different colors? Did we deliberately color them so that they look better?
Actually not.
When we installed dinosaur fossils, we respected the original color of the fossil itself very much, that is to say, what the original shape of the fossil looked like, what we must restore to it.
Including those bone cracks on it, etc., we will restore it.
If our dinosaur fossils are buried in that kind of sedimentary rock that contains relatively high ferric ions, it is a red rock. If it is buried in that kind of rock, its dinosaur fossils must be that kind of red, brick red. Category.
But if it is buried in the restoration environment, the gray-black rock formation.
The fossil it formed is this gray-black fossil.
Therefore, the color of each dinosaur fossil is not determined by the bones of the dinosaur itself, but by the environment in which the dinosaur was buried, the sedimentary environment where it was buried, and the rock of the buried surrounding rock.
[Commentary] Dear netizens, everyone knows that dinosaurs ruled our planet hundreds of millions of years ago, our pterosaurs flying in the sky, the plesiosaurs swimming in the water, and the Tyrannosaurus rex running on land.
[Concurrent] Dai Hui, Director of Chongqing Key Laboratory of Co-evolution of Paleontology and Paleoenvironment Co-evolution in Sichuan and Chongqing
Wait a minute, I need to interrupt.
You just said that dinosaurs ruled the whole earth, and you gave examples including pterosaurs in the air, and then plesiosaurs swimming in the water.
In fact, what I want to say is that the pterosaurs and plesiosaurs you just mentioned are not dinosaurs, only the Tyrannosaurus rex you just mentioned running on land, our Mamenchisaurus is a dinosaur, this is a classification The question of learning, does the one who leads the dragon must be a dinosaur?
For example, must the one with the cow be a cow, and is the snail a cow?
The dinosaurs we are talking about now generally refer to those four feet that we run on land, while the Tyrannosaurus rex has two feet.
Our limbs are the kind that run on the road, but after I finish this question, there must be some netizens who want to say that there must be no dinosaurs flying in the air?
After 20 years of research, we also have dinosaurs flying in the air, and even dinosaurs with feathers are also flying into the blue sky.
[Concurrent] Dai Hui, Director of Chongqing Key Laboratory of Co-evolution of Paleontology and Paleoenvironment Co-evolution in Sichuan and Chongqing
We may all have a general understanding that at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago, our dinosaurs experienced a mass extinction and all died.
But after our current research, the more mainstream view is that some dinosaurs evolved into birds.
We have a text in the fourth grade Chinese text of the People's Education Edition called "Dinosaurs Flying to the Blue Sky", which tells that some of our dinosaurs have grown wings and flew to the blue sky, so we birds, such as us The chickens and ducks are actually descendants of our dinosaurs.
[Concurrent] Dai Hui, Director of Chongqing Key Laboratory of Co-evolution of Paleontology and Paleoenvironment Co-evolution in Sichuan and Chongqing
Many of our disciplines actually have some cooperation between China and the West, and our cooperation in paleontology is very close.
As you can see, for example, the Pu'an Yunyang dragon named after our research, and our Yuanshi Bashan dragon, all of our foreign scholars participated.
Why do we need (foreign scholars to participate), because our dinosaur science is a material science, that is to say, when we discover a certain dinosaur or a certain fossil, we need to follow the same type or similar type, the dinosaurs discovered all over the world will go to For comparison, we may compare foreign specimens.
As we are unable to go out during this epidemic, we need foreign scholars to help us look at the specimens, which are the characteristics we need to observe.
For example, our Yunyangosaurus, I compared it with our domestic specimens when I was researching, and found that it was different from many dinosaurs in our country at the same time, that is, theropod dinosaurs.
I found Mr. Roger BJ Benson from Oxford University to help us look at the specimens of the large theropods he studied.
It just so happened that he helped us to take some pictures of the features of the same part of the Twistospondylosaurus and Metrospondylus, let us compare.
He found that our dragon was somewhat similar to the Twistospondylus and Metrospondylus he studied. After our comparison, we also solved some morphological problems.
After we compared it, we confirmed that it was a new genus and new species of dinosaur, and we named it Pu'an Yunyangosaurus.
This is what we see very often in paleontology (in research).
There are also some characteristics of our Chinese and Western paleontology. Because China has a vast land and abundant resources, paleontological fossils are naturally very rich, so many of our scholars are more committed to morphological research, as well as some of our basic research.
In the West, especially British scholars, few dinosaur fossils have been found in their countries in recent decades.
What are they doing with dinosaurs (research)?
Just do some research on new methods, such as some system evolution and so on.
We work with them to combine what they are good at and what we are good at, so that the research on specimens will be more thorough, and the value of our specimens will play a greater role.
Jia Nan, Liu Xianglin, Zhang Xu, Chen Chao, reporting from Chongqing
Responsible editor: [Luo Pan]