Dong Zhiming, 26, walked atop a low cliff of red and yellow sandstone in China's Xinjiang autonomous region, his eyes scanning the ground. He was oblivious to the intense summer heat and the desolate, even forbidding landscape of this corner of the region, some 180 miles from the city of Ürümqi. To the young paleontologist it represented rich hunting grounds for one of the world's rarest treasures — dinosaur bones.This was his first expedition, and he'd already spotted fossils of prehistoric fish and amphibians, but he had yet to discover any remains of the creatures that most fascinated him. He knew that even experienced field paleontologists could spend months on a dig without uncovering anything significant. Nevertheless, Dong felt strangely confident. He scanned the baked earth for a telltale sign — an unusual mounding of the landscape, an odd protuberance.
Dong and six colleagues from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing had set out from camp after breakfast. A half-hour later they'd halted their truck in the barren stretch he now searched. Then he saw it. Halfway down the slope was a dark, rounded shape like the rim of a buried football.
Looks interesting, Dong thought. Maybe ... Carving out steps with his hammer, he climbed down and carefully loosened debris around the object. I was right! he thought. "It's a big one!" he shouted to an IVPP technician. By late afternoon, they had excavated a vertebra from a sauropod, the most gigantic of dinosaurs, whose members include the Brontosaurus (=Apatosaurus).
China's Mr Dinosaur
Since that day in 1963, the man National Geographic Science Editor Rick Gore calls "China's Mr. Dinosaur" has found countless other fossils. Now head of IVPP dinosaur research, Dong is acclaimed as the world's most prolific dinosaur hunter. According to Peter Dodson, vice-president of The Dinosaur Society, Dong's finds include 18 new genera, or groups of species, three more than his closest competitor. His discoveries have shed light on dinosaur evolution and focused attention on China as a preeminent place to study the creatures.
Dong's fascination with dinosaurs began early. He was born in 1937 in the east coast town of Weihai. His father was a bus controller, his mother a housewife. As a child, he found no outlet for his surging energy in the classroom but loved the outdoors, especially running, swimming and fishing. Then when he was 13, he saw an exhibit about dinosaurs, which the Chinese call konglong — "terrible dragons." But unlike the dragons of mythology, he learned, dinosaurs were real. On display was a five-foot leg bone of a hadrosaur, a duck-billed plant-eater. It had an electrifying effect on the boy. He began searching out everything he could read about dinosaurs. Over the next decade he learned that China is incredibly rich in fossils; its valleys and flood plains preserved them from erosion, enabling them to weather the ages.
After Dong graduated from university with a biology degree in 1962, he entered the IVPP. Director Yang Zhong-jian, called the father of Chinese vertebrate paleontology, had studied in Munich, then worked in China alongside Western colleagues until 1949, when the Communists came to power and cooperation with the West ended. Now too old to do much fieldwork, he wrote papers, supervised research and taught, hoping for a promising student to carry on his dinosaur work.
Meeting Dong for the first time, Yang asked the alert, strongly built youth, "What do you want to study?" He expected it to be small fossils, which are easily carried and scrutinized in the lab. Dong replied, "Dinosaurs."
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