Yang Zhongjian

Biography

Yang was born in Hua County, Shaanxi, China. He graduated from the Department of Geology of Peking University in 1923, and in 1927 received his doctorate from the University of Munich in Germany. In 1928 he worked for the Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the Geological Survey of China and took charge of excavations at the Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian.

He held professorial posts at the Geological Survey of China, Peking University, and Northwest University in Xi'an. Yang's scientific work was instrumental in the creation of China's Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, which today houses one of the most important collections of fossil vertebrates in the world. He was director of both the IVPP and the Beijing Natural History Museum.

He supervised the collection of fossil remains of and research on dinosaurs in China from 1933 until the 1970s. He presided over some of the most important fossil discoveries in history, such as those of the prosauropods Lufengosaurus and Yunnanosaurus, the ornithopod Tsintaosaurus, and the gigantic sauropod Mamenchisaurus, as well as China's first stegosaur, Chialingosaurus.