It's somewhat analogous to the accidental discovery of major gold pockets at Sutter's Mill in California in 1848.Why didn't earlier settlers, traders, missionaries or indigenous peoples scoop up the yellow metal for themselves before the waves of miner forty-niners flooded to the Pacific Coast of North America? Because they didn't know they were treading over a king's ransom. Simply put, there wasn't much interest or knowledge of the wealth of long-extinct life-forms lurking under China's fertile riverbeds and sand-swept deserts until paleontologists began scouring terra firma in earnest.
But perhaps because of pent-up supply and sudden demand, over the past three decades, dinosaur hunters have been finding more and more evidence that tens of millions of years ago, a countless variety of "terrible dragons "as the Chinese word for dinosaurs－konglong－literally means, roamed the plains of what is now China. The West got digging early, even back in the 18th century when the father of evolutionary theory Charles Darwin was a mere twinkle in his parents' eyes. It's the latter we're concerned with here given the copious truckloads of fossilized dinosaur bones that have been dug up in the country over only the space of a few years. Paleontology is the study of fossilized plants and animals. But for another branch of the broad discipline of history－ie paleontologists－the pickings are even more plentiful. Many of us know it is the oldest continuously existing civilization, having gotten things rolling somewhere along the Yellow River about five millennia ago. China is a historian's field of dreams because it is truly a massively fertile platform for field research.
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