Here is a curiosity that takes us to the distant lands of China: why did the Chinese eat dinosaur fossils?
Why did the Chinese eat dinosaur fossils? They believed that bones had healing properties.
In 2006, it was discovered that for decades villagers in China’s Henan province had discovered dinosaur fossils that they mistook for dragon bones and, believing they had healing properties, boiled them in soup and consumed to treat dizziness and leg cramps, writes Britannica.
Why did the Chinese eat dinosaur fossils?
Residents of central China spent decades digging up bones they believed belonged to flying dragons: they used them in traditional medicine. It turns out that the bones were actually dinosaurs, and now scientists are the ones digging them up.
Until last year, wrote NBC NEWS in 2007the fossils were being sold in Henan province as “dragon bones” for about 25 cents a kilogram, researcher Dong Zhiming said.
The calcium-rich bones were sometimes boiled with other ingredients and given to children to treat dizziness and muscle cramps. Other times, they were ground up and made into a paste that was applied directly to fractures and injuries, he explained.
Dong was part of a team that recently excavated an 18-meter-long herbivorous dinosaur that lived 85-100 million years ago in Henan’s Ruyang County. Dong said that when residents learned the bones were dinosaurs, they donated 200 kilograms for him and his colleagues to research. In the previous two decades, residents dug up about 1 ton of bones.
“They thought the ‘dragon bones’ were from dragons flying in the sky,” said Dong, a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
