By Katie Hunt, Kristie Lu Stout, Jason Kwok, Yuli Yang and Shen Lu, CNN
Beijing (CNN)Paleontologist Xu Xing has discovered so many dinosaurs he’s lost count.
A spreadsheet he brings up on the desktop computer in his fossil-filled office in Beijing stops at 57, but Xu says he thinks it’s more than 60.
Whatever the exact number, Xu has named more dinosaurs than any other living paleontologist, unearthing fossils in some of China’s remotest corners that have revolutionized our understanding of prehistory.
They include the 8-meter long gigantoraptor, which stood twice as high as any man and the one-fingered linhenykus that could have danced on your hand.
Dinosaurs: Feathered friends?
But it’s not just the sheer number of dinosaurs.
Xu and his Chinese colleagues have found evidence that dinosaurs were not the scaly, reptilian killers depicted in movies but feathered, furry and a lot more bird-like.
In fact, it’s now widely accepted that the birds that flap around our backyards are descended from dinosaurs. But this was just a controversial theory until 1996, when the first feathered fossil was unearthed in Liaoning Province, northern China — the sinosauropteryx.
“When that fossil made its way to the West, actually photographs of it, it was scintillating… it blew people away,” says Richard Stone, international news editor at Science magazine.
Since then, some 35 feathered dinosaurs have been discovered, mainly in China.
Although the fossil evidence has yet to be found, Xu believes the vast majority of dinosaurs would have had feathers or bristles — including the fearsome tyrannosaurus rex and hulking, pea-brained sauropods.
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