Geological Museum of China

Address : Beijing, Xicheng District, Xisi, Yangrou Hutong, #15
Website : www. gmc. org. cn
The Geological Museum of China is located in Beijing at a place called Western Crossroads. It is an internationally renowned geological museum with the largest, rarest, and most valued collections in China. 1ts buildings cover some 11, 000 square meters and contain around 200, 000 items.
Begun in 1916, the museum is one of the oldest in China. In 2004, the rebuilt museum opened to the public, with an exhibition area of 4, 500 square meters. It now has an earth sciences hall, an ore hall, a paleobotanical hall, a gems hall, a prehistory biological hall, and a land and resources hall. In the prehistory biological hall, eight units cover the development of life on earth, from the earliest micro-organisms to the explosion of different life forms, to organisms becoming land creatures, to the great extinctions, to mammals and finally to hominids, or mankind.
The Museum's collections are extremely rich and contain many superlative Shantungosaurus giganteus fossils, rare fossilized primitive birds, the world's largest quartz crystal (3. 5 tons), the largest mono-crystal, and so on. The earliest hominid fossil to be found to date in China is exhibited here, known as the Yuanmou-Man tooth fossil from Yunnan Province. Artefacts from Zhoukoudian, the early-hominid site outside Beijing, are also on display As well as presenting material for public view, the Museum has been a research organization that carries on projects and produces publications. In this regard it has made great contributions in several areas that include dinosaur research, volcanic-activity research, work on botanical bridging of plants in the Jurassic period, and work on primitive birds in we stern Liaoning through fossil research that has particularly received recognition from paleobotanists around the world.