Xu Xing (paleontologist)
Xu Xing (Chinese徐星, Pinyin Xu Xing; * 1969 in Xinjiang ) is a Chinese vertebrate paleontologist who deals with dinosaurs.
Life and work
Xu's parents were exiled during the Cultural Revolution to the country and he grew up in poverty. In 1988, he won a scholarship to attend the University of Beijing and originally wanted to study economics, but has been seconded to the study of paleontology. At the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences ( IVPP ) in Beijing as a student of Zhao Xijin he became interested in dinosaurs. He analyzed Jurassic dinosaur fossils that had his teacher Zhao collected and as some of the oldest Ceratopsia turned out ( Yinlong ) He runs his own laboratory at the IVPP with seven taxidermists.
He is involved in numerous original descriptions, so the predators guanlong, gigantoraptor, Mei, Sinovenator, the feathered Yutyrannus, Yixianosaurus, Xixianykus, Erliansaurus, Eshanosaurus, Graciliraptor, Liaoceratops, Liaoningosaurus, Jinzhousaurus, Incisivosaurus, Jeholosaurus, Hongshanosaurus, Linheraptor, Zhuchenceratops, Microraptor, Nanyangosaurus, Neimongosaurus, Chaoyangsaurus, Dilong, the feathered Beipiaosaurus, Pedopenna, Sinornithosaurus, Sonidosaurus, Sinusonasus, Xinjiangovenator ( Dong Zhiming described above as Phaedrolosaurus ) Archaeovolans (which turned out to be juvenile specimen of Yanornis ) and Anchiornis with 60 first descriptions of dinosaurs ( as of 2012) he holds a record worldwide.
Among his first descriptions and examined by him dinosaurs are also a number of feathered dinosaurs, whose discovery in China presented the views about the relationship between birds and dinosaurs on a new basis.
He also works with commercial collectors, as the Director of the Tianyu Museum Xiaoting Zheng (former director of a state Gold Mine), which together contributed a large collection of feathered dinosaurs in particular. One of these finds, Xiaotingia zhengi ( named in honor of Xiaoting Zheng ), Xu used 2011 for a review of bird-like dinosaurs in the way of Archaeopteryx, which he filed closer to Deinonychus within Paraves. The findings of Microraptor and Anchiornis from the rich deposits of Liaoning with springs on both front and hind limbs are according to Xu no evolutionary dead end, but transitional forms to the really flying birds. Springs were widely used by Xu in dinosaurs and were originally used for purposes other than flight ( conservation of body heat, courtship ).
He struggled from the beginning to contacts with foreign scientists and published mostly in English and often in international journals. He also used consistently cladistics in his systematic work, at a time when this had not been enforced in dinosaurs in China, unlike the West. He goes in his systematic classifications thoroughly before and they have been asked often by western scientists in question. Xu sees the lack of willingness to criticize a major obstacle to the Chinese palaeontology and another obstacle in the widespread counterfeiting. Xu 2000 was involved in the investigation of counterfeiting of Archaeoraptor (composed of a bird fossil and Microraptor Buttock ).
He is also involved in the evaluation of the 2008 discovered very rich dinosaur discovery site in Zhucheng.
He is married and has two sons.
Writings
- Feathered dinosaurs from China and the evolution of major avian characters, Integrative Zoology 1, 2006, 4-11
- With Y. Guo The origin and early evoltution of feathers: insights from recent paleontological and neontological data, Vertebrata Palasiatica, 2009, 311-329
- Dinosaur distribution ( with Weishampel et al ) in Weishampel, Osmolska, Dodson The Dinosauria, University of California Press, 2nd Edition 2004