Villagers in central China have apparently been digging up dinosaur bones and boiling them in soup or grinding them into powder for Traditional Chinese Medicine, believing they were from flying dragons and had healing powers.

Until last year, the fossils were being sold in Henan province as “dragon bones” at about 4 yuan (65 yen) per kilogram, scientist Dong Zhiming told the Associated Press.

Fortunately, after discovering that they were really dinosaur bones, the villagers donated 200 kilograms of them to Dong, a professor with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “They had believed that the ‘dragon bones’ were from the dragons flying in the sky,” Dong said.

According to AP, 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. The practice had been going on for at least two decades.

Well, you know Shakespeare said that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” He was undoubtedly right, so think I would go with the dragon theory rather than the dinosaur one–which has been questioned by Creationists worldwide anyway? They are usually wrong–but maybe not always…

And remember that eating dinosaurs is not unknown in the West. The annual dinner party of the Explorers Club, for example, had a frozen Woolly Mammoth they dug up in Russia on the menu. And they eat other things that “would raise eyebrows in the foc’sle of a pirate ship” let alone any restaurant in Shanghai.

Use it or lose it
Antediluvian bones
Just museum piece?