Thursday, July 5, 2007

Chinese Villagers Eat Dragon Bones

Man on left: "Jeeze, that's a big drumstick."
Man on right: "Yum."

We now travel to Beijing, China where we will dive into the language of paleontology.

From Wikipedia:
Paleontology, palaeontology or palæontology (from Greek: paleo, "ancient"; ontos, "being"; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge") is the study of prehistoric life forms on Earth through the examination of plant and animal fossils.
In China, however, paleontology means "lunch".

This, according to Yahoo news, villagers in central China dug up a ton of dinosaur bones and ground them up for soup and traditional medicine. Up until last year, the bones were being sold as "Dragon Bones" in Henan province for about 50 cents per kilo.

Now, I'm not one to argue with local customs and indigenous cultural practices, but please. That's just ridiculous. Dragon bones? Apart from the irreplaceable scientific data that have been lost, it's just plain silly. Dragon bones?

We all know that Dragons with femurs that size are endemic to Europe. In contrast, Chinese Dragons have short legs and serpentine bodies, perfectly adapted to forest and riparian habitats. But seriously, if you are interested in the fun and amazing "science" of Dragonology, please check out this wonderful website. We could all use a bit of magic in our lives, eh?

A European Dragon, (Draco occ. magnus)

Back to reality. Dragon bones? I just don't get the practice of eating fossils.

Can you help me translate?

6 comments:

Jenny said...

Kinda reminds me of the giant turkey legs I saw people eating at the Texas State Fair! lol!

Anonymous said...

The Chinese probably have some ancient chinese secret about the bones, I don't know. They don't think the same about finds like that as we USer's do.

paisley said...

this post makes me homesick for chinglishness.... i love johnny depp... but i long for our leader.....

Translator said...

Jdariot - mmmm....turkey!

ba doozie - you're right. It is an entirely different cultural view of finds like that. To them, it's more important culturally to USE the bones rather than to STUDY the bones. Just a different culture.

Heh, heh. Sorry, Paisley. I've been a bit busy over here...

Unknown said...

Wow, amazing big bone.
Looking at the picture remind me of Eragon, and some dragons in games. lolz.

You went to China? o, great journey.

izzat said...

got bone..haha very big bone..
cool... but does dragon exist?
hehe.. should be dragon booster..
(^.^)