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Tianjin Natural History Museum
Tianjin Natural History Natural history museum, Museum is in Tianjin, China, and is located in No. 206 Machang Avenue, in the Hexi District, Tianjin, Hexi District. It was founded in 1914 as the Hoangho Paiho Museum. The museum has three floors and spans an area of 12,000 square meters. Over 380,000 geological and biological specimens are currently held at the museum. History The museum was founded in 1914 by Émile Licent, and was called the Hoangho Paiho Museum. For 25 years since the museum's founding, Licent conducted explorations in the Yellow River Basin and the Haihe River Basin, with the full length of the exploration stretching 50,000 kilometers. During these explorations, Licent collected over 200,000 paleontology, animal, plant, ancient human, and rock specimens. The Hoangho Paiho Museum was eventually renamed the Northern Border Museum. After the China, People's Republic of China was founded, the Northern Border Museum was hosted by Tianjin University, one of the larg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Natural History Museum
A natural history museum or museum of natural history is a scientific institution with natural history collections that include current and historical records of animals, plants, fungi, ecosystems, geology, paleontology, climatology, and more. History The primary role of a natural history museum is to provide the scientific community with current and historical specimens for their research, which is to improve our understanding of the natural world. Some museums have public exhibits to share the beauty and wonder of the natural world with the public; these are referred to as 'public museums'. Some museums feature non-natural history collections in addition to their primary collections, such as ones related to history, art, and science. Renaissance cabinets of curiosities were private collections that typically included exotic specimens of national history, sometimes faked, along with other types of object. The first natural history museum was possibly that of Swiss scholar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lystrosaurus
''Lystrosaurus'' (; 'shovel lizard'; proper Greek is λίστρον ''lístron'' ‘tool for leveling or smoothing, shovel, spade, hoe’) is an extinct genus of herbivorous dicynodont therapsids from the late Permian and Early Triassic epochs (around 250 million years ago). It lived in what is now Antarctica, India, China, Mongolia, European Russia and South Africa. Four to six species are currently recognized, although from the 1930s to 1970s the number of species was thought to be much higher. They ranged in size from that of a small dog to 8 feet (2.5 meters) long. As a dicynodont, ''Lystrosaurus'' had only two teeth (a pair of tusk-like canines), and is thought to have had a horny beak that was used for biting off pieces of vegetation. ''Lystrosaurus'' was a heavily built, herbivorous animal, approximately the size of a pig. The structure of its shoulders and hip joints suggests that ''Lystrosaurus'' moved with a semi-sprawling gait. The forelimbs were even more robust than ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Homo Erectus
''Homo erectus'' (; meaning "upright man") is an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene, with its earliest occurrence about 2 million years ago. Several human species, such as '' H. heidelbergensis'' and '' H. antecessor'' — with the former generally considered to have been the ancestor to Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans — appear to have evolved from ''H. erectus''. Its specimens are among the first recognizable members of the genus ''Homo''. ''H. erectus'' was the first human ancestor to spread throughout Eurasia, with a continental range extending from the Iberian Peninsula to Java. Asian populations of ''H. erectus'' may be ancestral to '' H. floresiensis'' and possibly to '' H. luzonensis''. The last known population of ''H. erectus'' is '' H. e. soloensis'' from Java, around 117,000–108,000 years ago. ''H. erectus'' had a more modern gait and body proportions, and was the first human species to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peking Man
Peking Man (''Homo erectus pekinensis'') is a subspecies of ''Homo erectus, H. erectus'' which inhabited the Zhoukoudian Cave of northern China during the Middle Pleistocene. The first fossil, a tooth, was discovered in 1921, and the Zhoukoudian Cave has since then become the most productive ''H. erectus'' site in the world. Peking Man was instrumental in the foundation of Chinese anthropology, and fostered an important dialogue between Western and Eastern science for decades to come. The fossils became the centre of anthropological discussion, and were classified as a direct human ancestor, propping up the Out of Asia hypothesis that humans evolved in Asia. Peking Man also played a vital role in the restructuring of the Chinese identity following the Chinese Communist Revolution, and was intensively communicated to working class and peasant communities to introduce them to Marxism and science (overturning deeply-rooted superstitions and Chinese creation myths, creation myths). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Homotherium
''Homotherium'', also known as the scimitar-toothed cat or scimitar cat, is an extinct genus of machairodontine saber-toothed predator, often termed scimitar-toothed cats, that inhabited North America, South America, Eurasia, and Africa during the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs (4 mya – 12,000 years ago), existing for approximately . It became extinct in Africa some 1.5 million years ago. The most recent Eurasian remains, recovered from what is now the North Sea, have been dated to around 28,000 years BP. In South America it is only known from a few remains in the northern region (Venezuela), from the mid-Pleistocene. Taxonomy and distribution The name ''Homotherium'' (Greek: (, 'same') and (, 'beast')) was proposed by Emilio Fabrini (1890), without further explanation, for a new subgenus of ''Machairodus'', whose main distinguishing feature was the presence of a large diastema between the two inferior premolars. The lineage of ''Homotherium'' is estimated (based on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Woolly Mammoth
The woolly mammoth (''Mammuthus primigenius'') is an extinct species of mammoth that lived during the Pleistocene until its extinction in the Holocene epoch. It was one of the last in a line of mammoth species, beginning with '' Mammuthus subplanifrons'' in the early Pliocene. The woolly mammoth began to diverge from the steppe mammoth about 800,000 years ago in East Asia. Its closest extant relative is the Asian elephant. DNA studies show that the Columbian mammoth was a hybrid between woolly mammoths and another lineage descended from steppe mammoths. The appearance and behaviour of this species are among the best studied of any prehistoric animal because of the discovery of frozen carcasses in Siberia and North America, as well as skeletons, teeth, stomach contents, dung, and depiction from life in prehistoric cave paintings. Mammoth remains had long been known in Asia before they became known to Europeans in the 17th century. The origin of these remains was long a matter o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stegodon
''Stegodon'' ("roofed tooth" from the Ancient Greek words , , 'to cover', + , , 'tooth' because of the distinctive ridges on the animal's molars) is an extinct genus of proboscidean, related to elephants. It was originally assigned to the family Elephantidae along with modern elephants but is now placed in the extinct family Stegodontidae. Like elephants, ''Stegodon'' had teeth with plate-like lophs that are different from those of more primitive proboscideans like gomphotheres and mastodons. The oldest fossils of the genus are found in Late Miocene strata in Asia, likely originating from the more archaic ''Stegolophodon,'' shortly afterwards migrating into Africa. While the genus became extinct in Africa during the Pliocene, ''Stegodon'' remained widespread in Asia until the end of the Pleistocene. Morphology Size Some species of ''Stegodon'' were amongst the largest proboscideans. ''S. zdanskyi'' is known from an old male (50-plus years old) from the Yellow River that is tall ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Platybelodon
''Platybelodon'' ("flat-spear tusk") is an extinct genus of large herbivorous proboscidean mammals related to modern-day elephants. Species lived during the middle Miocene Epoch in Africa, Asia and the Caucasus. Palaeobiology ''Platybelodon'' was previously believed to have fed in the swampy areas of grassy savannas, using its teeth to shovel up aquatic and semi-aquatic vegetation. However, wear patterns on the teeth suggest that it used its lower tusks to strip bark from trees, and may have used the sharp incisors that formed the edge of the "shovel" more like a modern-day scythe, grasping branches with its trunk and rubbing them against the lower teeth to cut it from a tree. Adult animals in particular might have eaten coarser vegetation more frequently than juveniles. Images File:Platybelodon.png, ''Platybelodon grangeri'' reconstruction with size comparison. File:Platybelodon NT small.jpg, Life reconstruction of ''Platybelodon grangeri''. File:Platybelodon.jpg, Outdated re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proboscidea
The Proboscidea (; , ) are a taxonomic order of afrotherian mammals containing one living family (Elephantidae) and several extinct families. First described by J. Illiger in 1811, it encompasses the elephants and their close relatives. From the mid-Miocene onwards, most proboscideans were very large. The largest land mammal of all time may have been a proboscidean; ''Palaeoloxodon namadicus'' was up to at the shoulder and may have weighed up to , almost double the weight of some sauropods like ''Diplodocus carnegii''. The largest extant proboscidean is the African bush elephant, with a record of size of at the shoulder and . In addition to their enormous size, later proboscideans are distinguished by tusks and long, muscular trunks, which were less developed or absent in early proboscideans. Three species of elephant are currently recognised: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. Elephantidae is the only surviving family of the or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Confuciusornis
''Confuciusornis'' is a genus of basal crow-sized avialan from the Early Cretaceous Period of the Yixian and Jiufotang Formations of China, dating from 125 to 120 million years ago. Like modern birds, ''Confuciusornis'' had a toothless beak, but closer and later relatives of modern birds such as ''Hesperornis'' and ''Ichthyornis'' were toothed, indicating that the loss of teeth occurred convergently in ''Confuciusornis'' and living birds. It is the oldest known bird to have a beak. It was named after the Chinese moral philosopher Confucius (551–479 BC). ''Confuciusornis'' is one of the most abundant vertebrates found in the Yixian Formation, and several hundred complete specimens have been found. History of discovery In November 1993, the Chinese paleontologists Hou Lianhai and Hu Yoaming of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at Beijing, visited fossil collector Zhang He at his home in Jinzhou, where he showed them a fossil bird specimen t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dilong Paradoxus
''Dilong'' (帝龍, which means 'emperor dragon') is a genus of basal tyrannosauroid dinosaur. The only species is ''Dilong paradoxus''. It is from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation near Lujiatun, Beipiao, in the western Liaoning province of China. It lived about 126 million years ago. Discovery ''Dilong'' was described by Xu Xing and colleagues in 2004. The name is derived from the Chinese 帝 ''dì'' meaning 'emperor' and 龙 / 龍 ''lóng'' meaning 'dragon'. "Di", "emperor", refers to the relationship of this animal to ''Tyrannosaurus rex'', the "king" tyrannosaurid. "Long" is used to name Chinese dinosaurs in much the same way that the Latin ''-saur'' is in the West. The specific name, ''paradoxus'', is a Latinisation of the Ancient Greek παράδοξον meaning 'against received wisdom'. Description The type specimen is IVPP 14243 (Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing), a nearly complete, semi-articulated, skull and skeleton. Referr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dsungaripterus
''Dsungaripterus'' is a genus of dsungaripterid pterosaur with an average wingspan of . ''Dsungaripterus'' lived during the Early Cretaceous in what is now China, and its first fossil was found in the Junggar Basin. Description ''Dsungaripterus weii'' had a wing span of . Like most dsungaripteroids it had a rather robust skeleton with thick walls and stouty bodily proportions, suggesting a mostly terrestrial lifestyle. The flight style of these animals is unclear, but it was probably punctuated by abrupt landings and extensive flapping. The skull of ''Dsungaripterus'', long, bore a low bone crest that ran down from the base of the skull to halfway to the beak. ''Dsungaripteruss head and neck were together almost long. Its most notable feature are its long, narrow, upcurved jaws with a pointed tip. It had no teeth in the front part of its jaws, which were probably used to remove prey from cracks in rocks and/or the sandy, muddy inland environments it inhabited. It had knobbly ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
