July 5, 2007
Dinosaur soup
Villagers in central China dug up a ton of dinosaur bones and boiled them in soup or ground them into powder for traditional medicine, believing they were from flying dragons and had healing powers.From Discovery News.Until last year, the fossils were being sold in Henan province as "dragon bones" at about 4 yuan (50 cents) per kilogram (2.2 pounds), scientist Dong Zhiming said Wednesday.
Dong, a professor with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said when the villagers found out the bones were from dinosaurs they donated 440 pounds to him and his colleagues for research.
Posted by David on July 5, 2007 9:12 PM
The Chinese have an imaginative folk medicine that includes marvelous curatives such as Black Bear gall bladders; deer penis powder, and on and on. The impacts on wildlife by this folk medicine has been horrific. The high prices for various animal parts has lead to ruthless poaching and destruction of animals. Chinese drug stores have long been the favorite haunts of paleontologists and some very early discoveries were made on the basis of teethh an bones found in Chinese stores. It is ironic that China, making the great leap into a modern world economy resist progress in other fields such as modern medicing.
Posted by: Donald Wolberg on July 6, 2007 10:26 PM
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