Dinosaur drawings feature on latest Chinese postage stamps

Zhao Chuang, an artist in Beijing, has collaborated with China Post on two sheets of stamps, Chinese Dinosaurs, which were issued on Friday. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Zhao Chuang, a Beijing-based artist, has drawn several birdlike dinosaurs for Chinese scientists who have found the fossils, and his images appear with scientific writings in international magazines and journals.

Zhao, 32, says: "Dinosaurs are still with us today."

And he explains this by saying that dinosaurs are accepted as the ancestors of birds, and that birds make up the largest proportion of vertebrates in the world.

The illustrator believes that to propagate the knowledge of dinosaurs, more ways should be used, including postage stamps, which he calls "a museum on paper".

Meanwhile, Zhao has collaborated with China Post on two sheets of stamps, Chinese Dinosaurs, which were issued on Friday.

One sheet features a microraptor, a four-winged feathered dinosaur from about 125 million years ago, whose fossils were discovered in 2000 in Liaoning province.

The other sheet depicts a Mamenchisaurus that has a remarkably long neck and whose fossils were discovered in 1952 on a highway construction site in southern Sichuan province.