An international symposium on Chinese paleontology discoveries and research in the past 15 years is being held in Beijing.

The three-day symposium, attended by dozens of top Chinese and overseas researchers, ends today.

It celebrates the 15th anniversary of the founding of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Pieced up with different lithospheric plates, China is seen as a "Kingdom of Paleontology" that yielded rich evidence important for the international scientific circle.

The fossils of feathered dinosaurs unearthed in northeast China's Liaoning Province, for instance, shed new light on the origin of birds and shortened the gap between theropod dinosaurs and birds.

Recent studies on protofeathers among various theropods indicate that feathers of modern appearance might have evolved more than once, said Zhou Zhonghe, an official with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In addition to feathered dinosaurs, the Jehol Biota in Liaoning also produced primitive birds suggesting that the morphological and ecological diversifications of Early Cretaceous birds are much greater than previously assumed, Zhou said.

Philip J. Currie, curator of dinosaurs with the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, Canada, said that in the 1990s, the expeditions of Chinese and international researchers established China as one of the most active and important sources of dinosaurs in the world.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, about 20 percent of the new dinosaurs described were from China, Currie said.

Besides the origins of early life and evolution, symposium participants also discussed important issues in stratigraphy, vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology and paleobotany.

(China Daily 10/12/2001)