Let's hope kids dig dinosaur magic again

China is a historian's field of dreams because it is truly a massively fertile platform for field research. Many of us know it is the oldest continuously existing civilization, having gotten things rolling somewhere along the Yellow River about five millennia ago. But for another branch of the broad discipline of history－ie paleontologists－the pickings are even more plentiful.

Paleontology is the study of fossilized plants and animals. It's the latter we're concerned with here given the copious truckloads of fossilized dinosaur bones that have been dug up in the country over only the space of a few years.

The West got digging early, even back in the 18th century when the father of evolutionary theory Charles Darwin was a mere twinkle in his parents' eyes. But perhaps because of pent-up supply and sudden demand, over the past three decades, dinosaur hunters have been finding more and more evidence that tens of millions of years ago, a countless variety of "terrible dragons "as the Chinese word for dinosaurs－konglong－literally means, roamed the plains of what is now China.