Jinpu giant camel skeleton to debut in Beijing

The Jinpu giant camel skeleton will debut at the National Museum of China in the exhibition of Archaeological Achievements honoring the 110th Anniversary of the museum. 

The skeleton is 3.4 meters in height, 1.5 meters in width, and 4.5 meters in length, which makes it the tallest, largest and only fully mounted camel skeleton in the world.

The giant camel skeleton was found at the late Cenozoic paleontological fossil site in Jinpu where a total of 45 skeletons have been unearthed. The number is the largest of that species in the world, and equals the sum of all other giant camel remains found in the past 100 years.

In 2018, the administrative committee of Dalian Jinpu New Area and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IVPP) jointly launched a research project at Camel Mountain in Jinpu and formed a joint scientific research team composed of experts and scholars from well-known universities and scientific research institutions to carry out multi-disciplinary comprehensive paleontological research. 

So far, tens of thousands of fossil specimens have been unearthed, and more than 100 kinds of mammal fossils have been discovered. Many rare species such as the Jinpu giant camel were found for the first time in Northeast China.

Experts from the scientific research team pointed out that the discovery of the paleontological fossil group at Camel Mountain is of great significance for the study of mammal and paleoanthropology in China, and fills a gap in academic knowledge of the period between 3.6 million and 1 million years ago.