Zigong Dinosaur Museum

National First Grade Museum; Built Over An In Situ Middle Jurassic Bone Bed · Zigong, Sichuan

A museum built directly on top of the bone bed it displays, at Dashanpu outside Zigong, and one of only a handful of sites in the world where Jurassic dinosaurs can be seen lying where they died. In 1972 gas workers digging at Dashanpu hit fossil bone; excavation uncovered a Middle Jurassic deposit of extraordinary richness, around 170 million years old, from a period poorly represented almost everywhere else on earth. Hundreds of individuals have come out of it, and the museum, opened in 1987, was built over the main quarry so that visitors walk on a gantry above a sloping rock face with skulls, ribs, vertebrae and limb bones still half-embedded in it, laid out in the tangle in which they were buried. Mounted skeletons fill the halls alongside - sauropods like Omeisaurus and Shunosaurus with its clubbed tail, the stegosaur Huayangosaurus, and predatory Gasosaurus. The museum closed for a major rebuild in May 2025 and reopened in stages through the summer of 2026.

Dashanpu, Da'an District, Zigong, Zigong, Sichuan, China

Reopened in stages through summer 2026 after closing for renovation on 10 May 2025. Pre-renovation hours were about 8:30-17:30 with last tickets 16:45, extended in golden week, and closed on the first Monday of each month except holidays; confirm current hours and price before travelling. Real-name booking required.

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