The first "Jurassic park" in China is expected to be opened on May 1 in Yongjing County, northwest China's Gansu Province, where the world's largest dinosaur footprints have been found.
Construction of the park and other preparations are well underway. Workers are busy installing protective shelters and fences where the footprints are located to avoid possible damage to the rare site, a local tourist official said.
Chinese archeologists discovered more than 100 dinosaur footprints near the bank of the Yellow River last month. One of the footprints, 1.5 meters long and 1.2 meters wide, is known as the largest of its kind in the world.
The footprints came from at least four different kinds of dinosaurs. Experts initially estimated that the footprints were probably made at least 100 million years ago, in the late Jurassic Period or early Cretaceous Period.
Research results show that the place where the footprints lie used to be part of the shore of a lake. The footprints were left mainly by a group of phytophagous dinosaurs followed by a few carnivorous ones.
(Xinhua 04/21/2001)
