Hezheng Paleozoological Museum 和政古动物化石博物馆

About Hezheng Paleozoological Museum

The Guangming Daily feature describes the museum, which it calls China's only museum of ancient vertebrate and ancient mammal fossils, as a specialist institution collecting and displaying late Cenozoic fossil mammals. It lists six claims of world standing in the collection: a Hezheng sheep found nowhere else, the world's richest 铲齿象 material, the largest true horse, the largest three-toed horse locality, the largest hyena, and the earliest woolly rhinoceros skull. The museum stands, it says, in the Linxia basin where the Qinghai-Tibet and Loess plateaux meet, an area that has yielded large numbers of fossils over more than half a century.

The museum building covers 23,000 sq m and holds more than 30,000 fossil specimens in three classes, eight orders and more than 150 genera and species, from four different late Cenozoic mammal faunas spanning about 30 million to 2 million years ago; the Xinhua report adds that 43 of the items are first-class and that only a small part is on display, the rest being in store. The Guangming Daily page names three display halls, the Linxia geology hall, the life evolution hall and the Hezheng fossils hall.

Both the Guangming Daily and Xinhua pages single out the 铲齿象 series: 24 skulls displayed in order from three or four months to over forty years of age, almost all excavated from the same place, and described as the only complete developmental series from juvenile to old age anywhere. The Hezheng sheep hall holds a large sheep head assembled from several skulls; the museum has more than 700 Hezheng sheep skulls and the species is dated to about 12 million years ago. The Xinhua report records that the museum serves as the Hezheng research base of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, handling collection, sorting and restoration for researchers, and that a team led by the institute's Deng Tao established a new giant rhinoceros species, the Linxia giant rhinoceros, from a skull museum staff found in the basin.

The museum's own website gives its address as Liangjiazhuang village, Chengguan town, Hezheng County, states that admission is free and that all visitors must book a timed slot under their own name, and shows a 9:00 opening, 17:00 last entry and 17:00 closing. Its announcements list carries both a closure notice dated 31 July 2026 and an opening notice dated 15 July 2026.

The Guangming Daily page records the museum as open all year with no closing days, but that is the position stated on the page itself, and the museum's own site now carries both a closure notice dated 2026/07/31 and an opening notice dated 2026/07/15. This record reports both rather than asserting the museum's current open state. The pages give no ticket prices, and the museum's site page used here gives no building dimensions, collection counts or exhibition description.

What to look for

• The 24 铲齿象 skulls in the 铲齿象 hall, arranged in order from three or four months to over forty years of age
• The Hezheng sheep display, a large sheep head assembled from several skulls, of which the museum holds more than 700
• The three display halls named by the Guangming Daily page: the Linxia geology hall, the life evolution hall and the Hezheng fossils hall

Location & getting there

Getting to Hezheng Paleozoological Museum

Confirm the venue or campus, reservation channel and exhibition calendar. A museum name may cover more than one building.

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