14 DAY TRIAL // Those Asians can ingest the oddest soups, made of anything: from the swift saliva nests to shark fins or dried frogs. In fact, it's no wonder, as they believe by ingesting rhino horns or tiger penis they would achieve the potency and power of those beasts (it would be much cheaper and environmentally friendly, with the same effects, to chew their nails and eat chicken).
Now this is the cherry on the cake: villagers in central China made soup of dinosaur bones! They dug up a ton of fossil bones which they boiled in soup or ground into powder for traditional medicine, as they thought they belonged to flying dragons and possessed healing powers.
"Until last year, the fossils were being sold in Henan province as "dragon bones" at about 4 yuan (50 cents) per kilogram (2.2 pounds)," researcher Dong Zhiming told The Associated Press.
When they were informed about the real nature of the bones, the villagers donated 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of bones to the scientists.
"They had believed that the 'dragon bones' were from the dragons flying in the sky. 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," said Dong, a professor with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Dong's team has recently discovered in Henan's Ruyang County a 60-foot (20 m) long plant-eating sauropod dinosaur, which lived 85 million to 100 million years ago, during the Cretaceous epoch and so far, the largest dinosaur ever found in Asia.
"Another two dinosaur fossils were being excavated in the area, which is rich in fossilized dinosaur eggs," Dong said.