For Immediate Release Contact: Pat Kremer/Nancy O’Shea (312) 665-7100 (For Media Use Only) Why China It’s no accident that China is where feathered dinosaurs were first discovered. China has some of the best preserved, most abundant, and most diverse dinosaurs of any place on Earth. Even while you’re reading this, dinosaur hunters are likely unearthing the next spectacular find or crating up the last. Why is China so rich in fossils? According to paleontologist Peter Makovicky, Field Museum Dinosaur Curator, it’s all about geology. “To get good preservation, you need an area where sediments are being deposited at a reasonably high rate, to give material a good chance of fossilizing,” he explains. “China had several episodes of tectonic shifting throughout the Mesozoic era, forming mountains separated by basins and creating a lot of fossil-bearing sediment.” Although dinosaur fossils are found on every continent, including Antarctica, the best conditions in the past—and the best dinosaur finds today—are in China, western North America, Argentina, and Saharan Africa. What’s important about good preservation, says Makovicky, is what we can learn from the minute details it reveals. For example, scientists were very excited to discover the clear impressions of primitive, filament-like feathers growing from the skin of the Sinosauropteryx. They could see that these were not true flight feathers, but simpler structures—similar to the insulating down feathers of modern birds—that could have evolved into feathers. And because Sinosauropteryx is not as closely related to birds as some other dinosaurs are (Velociraptor, for example), the presence of these downy structures told them that feathers began to evolve in dinosaurs long before the origin of birds. (Even with excellent preservation, though, not all Sinosauropteryx specimens—including the one in this exhibition—have preserved evidence of feathers.) Dinosaur Dynasty is rich in examples such as this—where small details hold the key to a dramatic evolutionary story. Dinosaur Diversity Dinosaur Dynasty also tells the story of how our planet changed over the 165 million years that dinosaurs ruled the earth—and how this affected the evolution of dinosaurs and other life. “We begin in the Triassic period, when Earth had just one supercontinent, Pangaea,” says the exhibition’s Senior Project Manager, Cheryl Bardoe. “The diverse reptiles of this period gave rise to tortoises, crocodiles…and the earliest dinosaurs.” The exhibition continues through the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs truly dominated the land. During this period, Pangaea began to fracture, seas opened up, and in a geographically isolated area that is now China, dinosaurs took their own evolutionary path. Around the world, dinosaurs developed new features adapted to their habitats: spoon-shaped teeth for chomping tougher leaves, strong leg and tail muscles for standing to graze on higher branches, serrated teeth for ripping into prey. “Adaptation is why we see Chinese dinosaurs that are similar to—but not exactly the same as—those we find in North America,” Makovicky notes. “Mamenchisaurus instead of Diplodocus, for example, or Monolophosaurus instead of Allosaurus.” In the Cretaceous period, the continents began to split apart and the climate cooled. Dinosaurs, in China and elsewhere, became even more diverse, including bird-like dinosaurs and dinosaur-like birds. And now they shared the land with small mammals and flowering plants. When a disaster ended the dynasty of the dinosaurs—along with countless other animals and plants—the stage was already set for mammals to take their place. “The North American version of this story may be familiar to some visitors,” Bardoe says. “In Dinosaur Dynasty they’ll discover that a similar story was unfolding everywhere on earth, but with an increasingly diverse and divergent cast of characters. And they’ll see how fossils helped scientists figure this out.” Continue