Word: museums
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...Tianyu Natural History Museum doesn't look like the repository of a scientific treasure trove. A nondescript brick building in Pingyi, a secluded town 430 miles (692 km) southwest of Beijing, its doors are guarded by two groggy security guards who spend their day flipping through newspapers and sipping tea. There are no curators or guides giving tours of the museum's 28 exhibit halls, and only a handful of visitors on a Sunday afternoon...
...open air around a room the size of a basketball court, along with Triassic fish and other more recent fossils, primarily from different parts of China. "We are the world's number one," says Zheng Xiaoting, director and keeper of the Tianyu (which means "universe" in Chinese) Natural History Museum's collection of thousands of dinosaur fossils. Though no official records of the collection's number exist, several Chinese paleontologists echo Zheng's claim that Tianyu houses the world's largest collection of dinosaur fossils. "In 10 years' time," says Zheng, who runs the largest business in town, a lucrative...
...fossil collection from individuals - an illegal practice permitted by authorities only because it is technically a state-owned institution. More problematic, however, is that there is no way of knowing how many of those fossils are real. Chinese scientists say fake fossils are so pervasive in Chinese museums that using authenticity as the basis for judging a collection's worth is unrealistic. "Granted, there are many fakes and processed [fossils] in Tianyu, like everywhere else in China," says Xu Xing, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who is part of a team that discovered primitive dinosaur feathers...
...Zheng declines to give an estimate for what percentage of Tianyu's collection could be fakes, but says he and his staff have started to label - but not remove - those that have proven not to be the real deal. To cope with the drastically shrinking market, Zheng says the museum will gradually shift its focus to scientific research, cooperating with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to study dinosaurs and early birds. After all, Zheng says, it was never about the money. "I don't care for Mercedes," he says when asked why he drives a battered VW Santana...
Since this summer, the Fogg Museum has been on lockdown for the long-discussed renovation intended to unite the Sackler, Fogg, and Busch-Reisinger Museums...