Are Chinese Dinosaurs Dragons or Fakes?

For many centuries, China has been associated with dragons, not the bad dragons of European stories but good, auspicious dragons. In fact, the Chinese have long claimed to find the bones of dragons. Today, many scientists believe ancient bones were not from a dragon but were in fact from dinosaurs.

China continues to be fertile ground for new dinosaur discoveries, so much so that some paleontologists (dinosaur-scientists) in the West have accused the Chinese of manufacturing dinosaurs. Meanwhile, the traditional dragons continue to be respected, so much so that the government of China censored a Nike ad showing a US basketball player defeating dragons.

From the early years of the twentieth century, paleontologists from other countries (first from Russia, later mainly from the United States) turned scientific eyes on the dragon bones that the people of China had cherished and used in their traditional medicine for centuries.

Among the most amazing dinosaur discoveries in China was that of American paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, who in the 1920's found the first dinosaur eggs in a nest thought to belong to Protoceratops, an early ancestor of Triceratops, although its horn was not much more than a lump on its nose. Protoceratops was the first dinosaur known from every stage of its life, from its eggs to adults.

A dinosaur found near the nest, along with Protoceratops, was dubbed Oviraptor (egg-thief), although in the 1990's, it was discovered that those eggs actually belonged to poor Oviraptor, a dinosaur that may been simply defending her own nest.

Psittacosaurus was another dinosaur discovered during the great American dinosaur-hunting expeditions to Asia in the early decades of the twentieth century. In the second half of the twentieth century, the search for dinosaurs in China took a distinct turn, as paleontologists from China began excavating the dinosaur fossils found throughout China.