科技英语新闻:World's only evidence of co-existing humans, dinosaur tracks found in China

BEIJING/CHONGQING, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- A team of Chinese and American scientists have discovered the world's only evidence of co-existing human beings and dinosaur tracks in a remote county in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, according to a paper published Saturday in the Geological Bulletin of China, a Chinese core academic journal.

Qijiang County's Lianhua Baozhai, which means "Lotus Mountain Fortress" in Chinese, has a large number of dinosaur tracks as well as a well-preserved fortress and historical epigraph, forming a direct line of evidence that ancient Chinese people built a residence and lived there for a long time, said Xing Lida, one of three researchers with the project as well as a doctoral degree candidate with the Department of Biological Sciences of the University of Alberta in Canada.

Chinese people could have lived here for more than 700 years, and the mud cracks, ripple marks and duck-billed dinosaur tracks were considered by them to be lotus leaf veins, water environment and lotus, respectively, which is why they named it the Lotus Mountain Fortress, Xing Lida told Xinhua.

"Research shows that dinosaur tracks impacted ancient Chinese place names and folklore, so place names and folklore can be major clues for us in tracing dinosaur tracks," Xing said.

According to the paper, the Lotus Mountain Fortress dinosaur tracks, the largest track group of cretaceous dinosaurs in southwestern China, contains 350 to 400 footprints that had been preserved in many ways, including concave footprints, convex footprints and multilayered footprints.