Xu Xing remembers receiving his acceptance letter from Peking University （PKU）—along with his assigned major， paleontology. He had always wanted to be a scientist， a big dream for a boy from the foothills of Xinjiang’s Tianshan Mountains.
“I didn’t know what paleontology meant， so I asked my teacher， who also didn’t know， and suggested that it might be a cutting-edge field，” Xu now laughs. “You can imagine my disappointment when I realized that I would be studying fossils hundreds of millions of years old.”
Today， Xu’s office at the Chinese Academy of Sciences is filled with fossils—crammed on tables， bookshelves， and even the floor， with the exception of a carefully constructed path from the door to his desk. As Xu walks by， he picks up these priceless items without a second thought; he’d dug most of them out of the dirt himself.
In fact， Xu has discovered over 70 new prehistoric species， the most of any living paleontologist in the world. He has the nickname “China’s Dinosaur King”; staff at London’s Natural History Museum have called him “the go-to man in China for anything people want to know about dinosaurs.”
Piquing their desire to know， though， is another matter. Against headlines about futuristic technologies such as gene-edited babies， straddling buses， and artificial “moons，” paleontology is often overlooked in China.
Yet some of the most revelatory recnt discoveries about dinosaurs have been from China， and there are hopes that paleontology is set for a major boost from a new generation eager to understand their prehistoric past.
One reason why China now appears to be a hotspot for dinosaur discoveries is simply because most easy-to-excavate fossils from North America and Europe have already been unearthed. Equally important is China’s diverse geography： Specimens have been discovered in 21 of China’s 34 provinces and autonomous regions. These range from the Early and Middle Jurassic hotbeds of Yunnan， Sichuan， and Guizhou， to the Cretaceous mother lode of Liaoning; the discoveries span periods of 200 to 66 million years ago.
Not all bones become fossils， nor are all fossils discovered; sedimentary rocks must stay close to the surface to be unearthed. But China’s housing and infrastructure boom has caused bones to be unwittingly uncovered at an astonishing rate. This has been a mixed blessing—the law requires these discoveries to be reported， which can delay or suspend a project indefinitely， incentivizing many developers to ignore or destroy them.