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Wired News is running an AP story about dinosaur bones that were once being used as dragon bones in traditional medicines taken and sold by locals in rural Henan Province. Now the site has been taken over by paleontologists for excavation. And that’s where the story ends, with progress and science after a break to gawk at the Chinese villagers eating dinosaur bones (which is what the headline emphasizes).

But that’s not really the whole story. Henan Province, especially in the rural areas, is poor– so poor that migrants from here to other provinces have begun to get a bad reputation; you really can’t understand how poor unless you’ve seen it first hand. When this site was taken over, the people who had been digging up the bones before lost a valuable source of income, and I somehow doubt that they received any compensation. Things like this have a real impact on people’s lives.  It’s not just about the science.

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