Dong Zhiming

He investigated and described the Shaximiao Formation; an important contribution to science since they are composed of Middle Jurassic beds which do not commonly yield fossils.

Yang had helped initiate the formal study of fossils in China during the 1920s and continued to lead the field of Chinese palaeontology even after cooperation with foreign institutions ended in 1949.

Dong Zhiming's palaeontology research halted in 1965 when he became one of many academics ordered to participate in the Down to the Countryside Movement, which saw him and 17 million other privileged youth in China sent to work on farms across the country.

Yang also returned to field work during this time, including a 1975 expedition in which he investigated reports of fossils being found by road crews in the town of Dashanpu, Sichuan.

One of Dong's first missions after returning to palaeontology was to follow up on Yang's finds at Dashanpu, and in 1976 he discovered the first dinosaur fossils dating to the Middle Jurassic that had ever been found in China.

[2] Dong's research at the site would lead to the formal description of the Shaximiao Formation and the preservation of over 15,000 ft2 of dinosaur-bearing bone bed as part of the Zigong Dinosaur Museum.

With $15 million CAD worth of funding, the mission was one of the largest ever mounted in the history of palaeontology and was the first major show of cooperation between Chinese and foreign palaeontologists since 1949.

Expeditions related to the project were undertaken in sites within both countries' borders, including the Canadian Arctic and the Junggar Basin of Xinjiang.

On the advice of his late mentor, Dong Zhiming continued his research into palaeontology with a focus on locating fossils that bridge known periods of dinosaur evolution and explain the gaps in-between.

[2] In a 1988 paper authored by Dong and translated into English by Angela Milner, he argued that legendary descriptions of dragon bones in the I Ching and other ancient works could be attributed to Chinese farmers uncovering and misidentifying dinosaur fossils.

[6] This 1992 review saw Dong and Sereno determine that Huayangosaurus had a parasacral spine, or a vertebral column which ran adjacent to the sacrum; and that the animal's heightened pedicles may have helped keep its dorsal plates in place without ossified tendons to hold them upright.

Studies by Richard J. Butler, Qi Zhao, and other researchers cast doubt on Dong's placement of Micropachycephalosaurus, and in 2011 the genus was reassigned to the suborder Ceratopsia.

In addition to this obvious meaning, the Mandarin word for "gas" can also be translated as "making trouble", an apparent reference to Zhiming's struggle with local authorities to preserve the fossil bone beds.