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Chinese villagers eat dinosaur bones

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. Until last year, the fossils were being sold in Henan province as ‘dragon bones’ at about 50 cents per kilogram, scientist told.

He said when the villagers found out the bones were from dinosaurs they donated 200 kilograms to him and his colleagues for research. “They had believed that the ‘dragon bones’ were from the dragons flying in the sky,” he said.

The calcium-rich bones were sometimes boiled with other ingredients and fed to children as a treatment for dizziness and leg cramps. Other times they were ground up and made into a paste that was applied directly to fractures and other injuries, he said.

The practice had been going on for at least two decades, he said.

Dong was among a team of scientists who recently excavated in Henan’s Ruyang County an 60-foot-long plant-eating dinosaur, which lived 85 million to 100 million years ago. Another two dinosaur fossils were being excavated in the area, which is rich in fossilised dinosaur eggs, Dong said. ap

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