About Chaoyang Bird Fossil National Geopark

Chaoyang Bird Fossil National Geopark

The Chaoyang Bird Fossil National Geopark in Chaoyang, Liaoning Province, is a palaeontological geopark and museum built over the richest fossil beds of the Jehol Biota, the Early Cretaceous ecosystem that has transformed modern understanding of how birds, mammals and flowering plants began. Known in Chinese as Chaoyang Niao Huashi Guojia Dizhi Gongyuan, it stands at 100 Longniao Street in Longcheng District, Chaoyang, in the west of Liaoning where the province meets Hebei and Inner Mongolia. Chaoyang styles itself China's "fossil capital" and "the place where the world's first bird took flight and the first flower bloomed," and the geopark is where those claims are exhibited. Its centrepiece, the Paleontological Fossil Museum, holds the park's two great treasures: Sinosauropteryx, the feathered dinosaur that provided key evidence linking dinosaurs to birds, and Archaefructus liaoningensis, among the earliest known flowering plants. Around the museum, a 900-mu park of fossil sites and a vast petrified wood forest presents the Jehol world at landscape scale.

Location and Layout of the Park

The geopark covers about 900 mu — roughly sixty hectares — at its main Longcheng District site, but its full identity is a federation of fossil localities across the Chaoyang area. It unites five areas: the Shangheshou fossil park, the Sihetun fossil park, the Lingyuan Dawangzhangzi fossil park, Fenghuangshan Park, and the Huaishudong scenic area. Shangheshou, Sihetun and Dawangzhangzi are not decorative additions; they are among the principal producing localities of Jehol Biota fossils, the actual quarries and outcrops from which the world's museums have drawn feathered dinosaurs, early birds and early flowers. The main park, built on original fossil beds and opened to the public in 2007 as a national 4A-rated attraction, gathers the museum, exhibition halls and the petrified wood forest into a single visitable site, while the outlying fossil parks preserve the source localities themselves. The geopark's main geological remains are described as palaeontological fossils, the fossil-bearing strata themselves, and geological structures — the rocks are part of the exhibit, not merely the scenery behind it.

The Jehol Biota: A World Preserved in Stone

Everything at Chaoyang depends on the Jehol Biota. Between roughly 133 and 120 million years ago, in the Early Cretaceous, the lakes and forests of what is now western Liaoning supported an ecosystem of extraordinary diversity. Xinhua's reporting on the park explains the preservation in terms of the region's geography: a microclimate system composed of sixteen basins created ideal conditions for ancient life to flourish, while volcanic eruptions and mudslides quickly buried organisms, preserving them in incredible detail for over one hundred million years. The result, in the words of Xu Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, is that "the Jehol Biota fossils found in Chaoyang give us critical insight into how today's terrestrial ecosystems originated and evolved." Across more than 10,000 square kilometres of the Chaoyang region, incomplete statistics count more than twenty palaeontological phyla and thousands of species: insects, bivalves, gastropods, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals among the animals, and ferns, cycads, ginkgoes, conifers and angiosperms among the plants. The geopark presents this whole lost world, and its displays are organised around the evolutionary firsts the Jehol rocks have yielded.

Protection: From Fossil Beds to National Geopark

The protection of the Chaoyang fossils began before the geopark itself. In August 1998, with the approval of the State Council, a national bird fossil nature reserve of 46.3 square kilometres was established in nearby Beipiao, where fossils had been discovered earlier and in great variety — an unusually high level of national protection for a fossil locality, reflecting how quickly the scientific world recognised what Liaoning held. The geopark built on that foundation, converting scattered, vulnerable fossil sites into a managed heritage landscape combining scientific research, popular science, leisure and tourism. Park descriptions boast of the Chaoyang resource in superlatives — the longest span of fossil-bearing time, the largest numbers, the most complete species, the richest horizons and the highest research value — and call the area a world fossil treasure house holding the most complete system of Jehol Biota fossil resources known. Such language is promotional, but the underlying claim is accepted by palaeontologists: no other region preserves the Jehol ecosystem so completely, and the geopark is its public gateway.

The Paleontological Fossil Museum

The park's indoor core is its Paleontological Fossil Museum, a comprehensive museum integrating fossil exhibition, collection and popular science. The museum was originally built with about 12,300 square metres of space over three floors, with halls described in earlier accounts as including a popular-science earth hall, a dinosaur empire hall, a wood fossil hall and Jehol Biota displays; it was billed as the largest single palaeontological fossil museum in China, displaying more than a thousand Jehol fossil specimens — fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals and plants among them. An expansion and renovation enlarged the museum to about 19,000 square metres, reorganising it into five themed exhibition zones focused on the key scientific questions of the collection: the origins of birds, the origins of mammals, the origins of flowering plants, and the evolutionary links between dinosaurs and pterosaurs. The museum's famous fossil wall and its hands-on elements, including simulated digs where children brush sand away from replica finds, make it as much a science-education centre as a gallery of specimens.

The 2025 Renovation and a Tourism Boom

The renovation completed in 2025 transformed the scale of what visitors can see. Reporting by Xinhua in August 2025 recorded that the number of fossils on display in the geopark jumped from 435 to 2,025 — a near fivefold increase — led by the star fossil of Sinosauropteryx. The effect on the public was immediate: the park drew over 60,000 visitors in the 2025 May Day holiday alone, up 133 percent year on year. Xinhua's account of the renovated museum lingers on a five-year-old visitor conducting a simulated excavation with a tiny brush, his father beside him — an image the park cultivates deliberately, presenting palaeontology as an activity rather than a spectacle. The renovation also marks a shift in the museum's argument. With five zones organised around origins — of birds, mammals and flowers — the museum no longer simply shows Chaoyang's fossils as wonders; it uses the enlarged display to walk visitors through the evolutionary debates those fossils settled, treating the Jehol Biota as evidence in a story about how the modern living world came to be.

Sinosauropteryx: The Feathered Dinosaur

The geopark's first treasure is Sinosauropteryx, the "Chinese dragon bird." The fossil, about 125 million years old, preserves a small theropod dinosaur whose skeleton is typically dinosaurian but whose body, from head to tail tip, carries a covering of hair-like epidermal filaments — the first clear evidence of feather-like structures on a non-avian dinosaur. Its discovery opened a new climax in Jehol research: the long-debated hypothesis that birds evolved from dinosaurs acquired physical proof, and dozens of feathered dinosaur fossils have since been found, including early birds, Beipiaosaurus, Sinornithosaurus and the four-winged Microraptor. The park presents Sinosauropteryx accordingly, as key evidence of the evolutionary transition from dinosaurs to birds, and Chinese accounts call it, loosely, the "first bird" — the fossil that lets Chaoyang claim to be where the first bird took flight. In the museum the specimen anchors the bird-origins zone, surrounded by the early bird fossils, including Confuciusornis, for which the region is equally famous.

Archaefructus and the First Flower

The second treasure answers the first. Archaefructus liaoningensis, the "Liaoning ancient fruit," is among the earliest known flowering plants, and its presence in the same rocks as the feathered dinosaurs is what allows Chaoyang to pair its slogans: the first bird and the first flower from one fossil fauna. Microraptor zhaoianus and the Liaoning ancient fruit were both found in these rock layers, as park guides note, letting a single visit trace the evolutionary path from dinosaurs to birds and the rise of the flowering plants together. The pairing matters scientifically as well as rhetorically. The Jehol Biota preserves not isolated curiosities but an ecosystem at the moment of several modern beginnings — feathered flight, early mammals and the angiosperms that now dominate terrestrial plant life. The museum's five-zone structure, with a dedicated zone for the origin of flowering plants alongside those for birds and mammals, is built around exactly that simultaneity, and Archaefructus is its founding specimen.

The Petrified Wood Forest

Outdoors, the park's most striking landscape is not a building but a forest of stone. A petrified wood forest of about 50,000 square metres holds more than 1,200 fossil trees, described as the world's first migratory wood fossil forest — "migratory" because the great silicified trunks were gathered and re-erected here from their find sites, rather than being preserved where they grew. The effect is a grove of stone trees at full forest scale, conveying the size of the Jehol forests in a way no cabinet specimen can. Together with the museum's wood fossil hall, the forest completes the park's presentation of the Jehol world: animals in the galleries, plants as specimens, and a whole fossil woodland outside. Park descriptions rank the petrified forest alongside the museum as one of the geopark's superlatives — the world's largest ex-situ protected petrified forest — and for many visitors its silent, mineralised trunks, each the product of the same volcanic burial that preserved the feathered dinosaurs, are the most memorable sight in Chaoyang.

Research, Education and the Fossil Capital

The geopark's work extends beyond display. It functions as the public institution of a living research landscape: the fossil localities it administers continue to be studied, its museum collects and conserves the region's specimens, and its education programmes — dig simulations, science halls and guided fossil interpretation — train the local public in why the rocks under their city matter. That mission has reshaped Chaoyang itself. Xinhua's 2025 reporting presented the renovated geopark under the theme of prehistoric bones breathing new life into the city's modern tourism: a once primarily industrial city in western Liaoning now markets itself nationally as the fossil capital, with the geopark as its flagship attraction. The claim rests on substance. A heritage-themed park that is also, as its descriptions note, the only in-situ fossil-themed park of its kind, holding the two emblematic fossils of the dinosaur-bird transition and the flowering-plant origin, gives Chaoyang a scientific identity few cities anywhere can match.

Visiting the Geopark

The main park stands at 100 Longniao Street — the street name itself, "Dragon Bird Street," advertises the collection — in Longcheng District, and guides list opening hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with last entry at 4:30 p.m. A visit divides naturally into three parts: the Paleontological Fossil Museum, with its five themed zones, fossil wall and the Sinosauropteryx and Archaefructus treasures; the outdoor petrified wood forest; and, for visitors with more time, the wider geopark landscape of fossil localities and Fenghuangshan. Families are a core audience, and the museum's simulated digs and child-scaled interpretation are designed for them. What a visitor takes away, beyond the individual specimens, is the completeness of the Chaoyang record: in one park, the rocks that settled the origin of birds, yielded one of the earliest flowers and preserved an entire Cretaceous ecosystem in volcanic ash are presented together, in the city that has made them its name.