Come for the coffee, stay for the 100 million year old footprint. At the beginning of July, in a restaurant in Leshan, a city in the province of Sichuan in eastern China, a customer discovered quite by chance a dinosaur footprint.
To the untrained eye, the courtyard of this restaurant simply appears to be made of naturally irregular rough stone. For a long time, this archaeological specificity therefore went unnoticed, until it attracted the attention of a client enough to ask scientists to identify the source of these irregularities on the ground.
After studying the track with a 3D scanner, paleontologist Lida Xing from the Beijing University of Geosciences concluded that the terrace of this restaurant was well placed in the footsteps of not one, but two dinosaurs. The creatures were part of the order of sauropods, this kind of huge dinosaurs with long necks to which, for example, the diplodocus belongs.
Rebirth of the Fossil
According to the scientist, the two sauropods surveyed what would become Asia at the beginning of the Cretaceous, nearly 100 million years before our era. Finding this kind of traces in the city is extremely rare. Before a restaurant moved on the site, it was a chicken farm that occupied the site. The traces were thus protected by earth and sand.
Miraculously, when the restaurant settled on site a year ago, the owner liked the look of the stone lying under the sand, and decided to install his terrace there without covering it with concrete.
Xing welcomes the growing interest in paleontology in the country: “Ten years ago, no one would have sent me a picture of potential dinosaur fossils. Today I get them from normal citizens, and I can confirm the presence of footprints several times a year.»
“Right now, China is experiencing a renaissance in fossil discovery.abounds with NPR an American researcher. Many exciting sites are being discovered.» The next time you have a coffee on the terrace, keep an eye out.
