For Immediate Release Contact: Pat Kremer/Nancy O’Shea (312) 665-7100 (For Media Use Only) China and the Field: Partners in Research In the mid-1990s, after many years of isolation, the Chinese government opened its doors to international collaborative fieldwork. The Field Museum has welcomed the opportunity to better understand this important country and to collaborate with Chinese colleagues across a variety of disciplines. Following are some of the projects recently completed or currently underway. In a large cave site in the southern Chinese province of Guizhou, Field Museum adjunct curator Deborah Bekken is working with researchers from Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), and others from U.S. universities. They have been excavating human and animal bones, tools, and other deposits from 150,000 to 250,000 years ago—remains that will help the scientists understand how our early ancestors adapted to this changing environment, used the resources they found there, and developed increasingly complex abilities over time. Regional archaeological surveys, which identify the distribution of settlements and artifacts over a broad landscape, are critical for understanding how settlements and human activities change over time. Anne Underhill, Gary Feinman, and Linda Nicholas, from The Field Museum, with colleagues from Shandong University in China, have conducted a regional survey in southeastern Shandong province for eight winter seasons since 1995. The team has surveyed the area around Liangchengzhen, a large settlement from the Longshan period (c. 2600-1900 BCE), first excavated in 1936. As of the summer of 2003, the team had surveyed 287 square miles of land, and another survey season was planned. (Recent fieldwork is supported by the National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation.) The team has discovered many smaller, previously unknown settlements that contributed significantly to the region’s economy, and some evidence that the region was reorganized following a collapse of the social system at Liangchengzhen. Underhill and her Chinese colleagues also conducted major excavations at Liangchengzhen for three fall seasons, from 1999 to 2001. Where previous work at the site had focused on burial practices, this team, along with supporting scientists in Beijing, Toronto, and the U.S., are looking at many components of life in the settlement—including housing, agriculture, and craft production—to determine how Liangchengzhen functioned as a ceremonial, economic, and political center. They are currently preparing a series of reports for publication in Chinese and in English. Ginseng, a plant greatly valued in China and in alternative medicine in the West, grows in only two areas on Earth: eastern Asia and eastern North America. Certain mushrooms species show a similar pattern. Two Field Museum botanists, associate curator Jun Wen, who focuses on ginseng, and department chair and curator Greg Mueller, our mushroom specialist, are combining their specialties and working with Chinese colleagues to determine what complex biologic and geologic events led to this “disjunct distribution” pattern. Their work will help us understand what it takes to save a species—and the Earth’s diversity—before it’s lost forever. Peter Makovicky, the Field’s assistant curator of dinosaurs, is perhaps best known for his discovery of a thin, comb-like structure on the beak of an ostrich-like dinosaur, gallimimus bullatus. That fossil came from the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, but Makovicky has also collaborated with Chinese colleagues. The Chinese scientists had discovered a new dinosaur—a small, primitive cousin of Triceratops called Liaoceratops. (The dinosaur is named after the province of Liaoning, where many well-preserved fossils—including feathered dinosaurs—have recently been found.) The discoverers invited Makovicky to work with them on analyzing the fossils, which have provided important insights into the origins and evolution of ceratopsian dinosaurs. He also collaborated with the same Chinese team in studying an advanced, bird-like, meat-eating dinosaur that they named Sinovenator (Chinese robber). Makovicky is planning more collaborative fieldwork in China, to search for even more primitive specimens; he is there in the summer of 2003 doing fieldwork supported by the National Geographic Society. The placodonts were a group of strange marine reptile of the Triassic period, with stout, armored bodies, paddling abilities, and large tooth plates ideal for crushing hard-shelled food. A few years ago, Olivier Rieppel, chair of The Field Museum’s geology department, examined fossil specimens of several placodont species and gave the group a (rather controversial) place on the family tree. Though placodont fossils had at the time been found only in Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East, Rieppel, looking at the relationships of the group to other reptiles, predicted that specimens would also be found in China. He was criticized for the daring prediction—but shortly after publication of his paper, a placodont specimen did indeed turn up in China’s Guizhou province, and later several more. Rieppel’s work has provided the basis for ongoing collaborative research on Triassic reptiles with faculty and students from the IVPP in Beijing. Yet another Field Museum paleontologist, Lance Grande, has been working in collaboration with Chinese scientists—though in this case they have come to the Field, bearing fossils from China. Grande and Mee-Mann Chang, a member of the Chinese National Academy of Science and former director of the IVPP, have been studying the early evolution of herringlike fishes. Grande has also served as advisor to one of Chang’s students, and accepted another as a post-doc student. That student, Fan Jin, is now himself a curator at IVPP, specializing, like Grande, in fossil fishes. Perhaps the most critical of all the collaborative work between The Field Museum and Chinese scientists addresses issues of conservation. China is a vast country, astonishingly rich in biodiversity—most of it as yet unexamined. Yet it is also a country undergoing sudden and rapid development, putting its biodiversity at risk. Continue