Makers › Scientist
Yang Zhongjian
Vertebrate palaeontologist who helped direct the Zhoukoudian excavations and in 1941 published Lufengosaurus huenei, the first dinosaur study by a Chinese scholar.
Mural of the event “Peking Man Discovered”, which this person took part in.
From 1927 the Geological Survey of China and Peking Union Medical College excavated Locality 1 on Dragon Bone Hill at Zhoukoudian, in Fangshan southwest of Beijing, systematically. On 2 December 1929 Pei Wenzhong, who was directing the dig, found the first complete Peking Man skullcap deep in the cave, and in November 1936 Jia Lanpo, then in charge of the dig, found three more skulls. By the time work stopped in 1937 Zhoukoudian had yielded many human fossils, stone tools and traces of fire.
Also known as Zi Keqiang · C. C. Young
- Roles
- Scientist
Yang Zhongjian, courtesy name Keqiang, was born at Huaxian in Shaanxi in 1897. A geology graduate of Peking University, he took his doctorate at the University of Munich in 1927 with a study of fossil rodents from north China. From 1928 he helped direct the excavation of the Peking Man site at Zhoukoudian, and when the Geological Survey set up its Cenozoic Research Laboratory in 1929 he became its deputy director. During the war he worked in Yunnan on dinosaur fossils newly found at Lufeng and in 1941 published his monograph on Lufengosaurus huenei, the first book on dinosaurs by a Chinese scholar. From 1959 he was the first director of the Beijing Museum of Natural History. He died in Beijing in 1979.
Life and times
Dates 1897 CE–1979 CE
- 1927Peking Man DiscoveredTook partage 30