China’s dinosaur factory: behind the scenes at an animatronics manufacturer, where prehistoric beasts come to life
The artisans of Zigong in Sichuan province are hitting the replica-dinosaur ball out of the Jurassic park, supplying four out of every five models of the prehistoric beasts around the world
Deep within the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, Zigong is home to monsters. A juvenile tyrannosaurus threatens passengers in the city’s long-distance bus station; sauropods snake along slip roads of the main highway; a stout stegosaurus and a truculent triceratops lurk at Gaoxin Industrial Park; and, upon reaching the unit that houses the workshops of Gengu Longteng Science & Technology, visitors are greeted by a dignified diplodocus at the front gate.
Beside the warehouse rests a gigantic, fish-like reptile, with gaping jaws and menacingly long teeth. Also present are velociraptors and brontosauruses and a host of other critters that only a palaeontologist would know how to name.
The Gengu Longteng factory is the jewel in the crown of a manufacturing industry dominated by China. In a little over a decade, 25 companies in the Zigong area have grown to fill about 80 per cent of global demand for large, animatronic or stationary replicas of dinosaurs, according to the Sichuan Bureau of Commerce.
Gengu Longteng and its 220 workers turn out more than 2,000 dinosaurs each year and account for about 10 per cent of the area’s total output. “Our city has always had a good supply of technical workers,” says Gengu Longteng’s chief executive, Guo Qihong, 43, who established the company 12 years ago. “Now we have built up a skill base for our craft that is second to none.”
While Zigong is home to legions of talented dinosaur makers, its original commercial advantage came in the early 1970s, when an oil-prospecting team, drilling in the township of Dashanpu, about 7km northeast of today’s city centre, unearthed one of the largest deposits of fossils ever discovered from the Jurassic period (which extended from 201 million to 145 million years ago).
Fossilised bones from hundreds of individual dinosaur specimens have been recovered since, and a popular theory has it that the site was once a prehistoric lake into which reptilian corpses were flushed. “Dashanpu is unique in that it fills a big knowledge gap from a very important period,” says Ye Yong, director of research at the Zigong Dinosaur Museum’s Centre of Jurassic Stratigraphy and Palaeontology. “Comparative finds elsewhere have been sparse and their specimens incomplete.”
