Please Pass Me a Helping of T-Rex Noodle Soup
I understand that people can make mistakes. But do dinosaur and dragon taste the same?
The Associated Press reports that villagers in central China dug up a ton -- that's right, a ton -- of dinosaur bones and boiled them in soup or ground them into powders for traditional medicines, thinking they were dragon bones with healing powers.
The calcium-rich bones were sometimes boiled with other ingredients and fed to children as a treatment for dizziness and leg cramps. Other times they were ground up and made into a paste that was applied directly to fractures and other injuries, he said.The practice had been going on for at least two decades, he said.
Maybe they got the kids to eat it by saying it tasted just like chicken.
Once the villagers discovered that the bones were not, in fact, from dragons, they donated some 440 pounds of fossils to the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
It's kinda cool to still believe in dragons in the 21st century. There's no word if the knowledge the bones were from dinosaurs has extinguished that belief.
5:04 PM ET | 07- 5-2007 | permalink
