Liaoning: Feathered Dinosaurs Beneath China's Rust Belt Province

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Liaoning, China's southernmost northeastern province, wraps around the Yellow and Bohai Seas and borders North Korea across the Yalu River. Its name means the pacified Liao River, though the fertile Liao basin was fought over from the fourth century BC onward. In the 1440s the Ming built the Liaodong Wall, mostly dirt dikes and moats meant to stop cavalry rather than withstand sieges. The Jurchens, later called the Manchus, overran the region in the early 17th century and moved their capital in 1625 to what is now Shenyang. The wars left the land so empty that a 1661 report found cities like Tieling housing only a few vagrants, so the Qing recruited Han farmers from Shandong while building the Willow Palisade, ditches lined with willow trees, between 1638 and 1672 to keep them out of Manchu lands. The population doubled between 1683 and 1734 anyway, and Liaoning today is about 84 percent Han with roughly 13 percent Manchu.

Liaoning was the center of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, including the Battle of Mukden, later the industrial core of Manchukuo, and after 1949 the pioneer of Chinese heavy industry, with vast steelworks in Anshan, before becoming known as China's rust belt. Beneath it lies the Jehol Biota of the early Cretaceous, about 120 to 130 million years old, where fine volcanic ash sealed lake beds in oxygen-free conditions and preserved soft tissue. In 1996 researchers found Sinosauropteryx prima, a small meat-eating dinosaur with feathers along its back and tail, proof that dinosaurs had feathers. Finds like the early tyrannosauroid Dilong paradoxus showed feathers evolved long before flight, and preserved melanosomes let scientists reconstruct the colors of extinct animals.

• The Ming dirt wall worked like a giant speed bump, forcing horse-mounted raiders to dismount or funnel into guarded passes.
• Qing officials repeatedly issued edicts ordering illegal Han migrants home, with little effect.
• Li Keqiang, later Premier of China, judged Liaoning's economy by electricity use, rail cargo and bank lending instead of local GDP reports.
• The ash preserved stripes on fish, spots on turtles and the proboscis of an early bee.
• Repenomamus robustus, a badger-sized mammal of about 15 kilograms, was found with a juvenile dinosaur in its stomach.