Hot Spots
Potentially, the only dinosaur "hot spot" in Tibet is Changdu (Qamdo) Prefecture which has yielded a hatful of presumed Middle Jurassic critters. Unfortunately, non of them have been officially published. During the construction of the No.214 State Highway in the same area in 1999, Tibetan locals vented at dig crews who had apparently scared away their Shan Shen (Mountain deity), or perhaps King Gesar of the epic poem, who left a trail of foot prints in the rubble as he left post-haste. As it happens, the trackway was made 160 million years ago by a Jurassic-aged sauropod dinosaur, probably a titanosauriform judging from its wide-gauge stance, but there are no confirmed fossil bones to go with it. Late Cretaceous-aged sauropod and possible hadrosaur tracks were reported from Dingqing County in 2023. Although affectionately known as "the roof of the world", with some of the globe's highest mountainous peaks, Tibet was once the bottom of a prehistoric sea.
