CHINA – Dinosaur Valley, a mysterious place in Xinjiang Province, in northwestern China, is filled with giant reddish brown rocks thought to be from the Mesozoic era. A lot of dinosaur fossils have been found here. Recently, the largest known stegosaur fossil was excavated from two of the digging sites in the Dinosaur Valley.
According to the Shanghai Morning Post, in 1985, a dinosaur expedition formed by Canadian and Chinese paleontologists found four dinosaur fossils in the Valley. These fossils included four classes of dinosaurs; some of them were carnivorous and others herbivorous.
In 1997, a 19.5 ft. (6.5 m) dinosaur fossil was found here. Its biggest bone had a near 8-inch (20 cm) diameter. From 1999, the expedition spent four years digging out a klamelisaur (sauropod dinosaurs, long-necked, and lizard-hipped) fossil using detonators and explosives. Only part of its neck bones and its skull were preserved. The paleontologists calculated that the klamelisaur was over 72 ft. (24 m) long and 30.ft. (10 m) tall. It became the biggest dinosaur in the world surpassing the seismosaurus found in the U.S.
The expedition found five digging sites in the Valley. No. 1 site was the largest, over ten yards deep and about the same in length and width. It took four years to dig the site and the biggest dinosaur in the world was found here.
"Other than the biggest dinosaur, there are other important discoveries in the No. 1 and No. 2 sites," said the director of the dig, Wang Haijun, an engineer from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
On August 26, 2006, an important discovery was fully excavated, a plate from a stegosaur's back and two fossils suspected to be part of a dinosaur's skull. The length of the back plate is 1.37 meters (4.49 ft.). Before the find, the longest known back plate was a 1.2 meter (3.94 ft.) plate excavated in Sichuan province.
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