China Paleozoological Museum

China Paleozoological Museum is a modern natural science museum that integrates research, collection, protection, exhibition, and education. The museum is located on the south side of Dongfeng Road, East Third Ring Road, Baoding City. The museum has a total construction area of about 73,000 square meters, making it the largest natural science museum in Asia. It was designed by Wang Shu, a Chinese architect and winner of the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Wang Shu's design concept is to combine the theme of "paleozoology" with modern architectural concepts, allowing the public to better understand the grand process of life evolution. The design of the museum is inspired by "layered city structures and endless green fields," with a heavy and elegant layout, a combination of reality and illusion, and a distinctive regional character and unique artistic temperament. The overall plan of the building consists of seven city walls, surrounded by the vast North China Plain, symbolizing layered city structures and endless green fields. The rectangular exhibition halls on top of the city walls overlap and intersect, representing the intense plate movements of the Earth in ancient times. The museum has five themed exhibition halls: Earth Pulse, Ancient Oceans, Dinosaur Empire, Mammalian Renaissance, and Extinction Sorrow, as well as two large temporary exhibition halls. The themed exhibitions are centered around the theme of "Nature, Life, and Humanity," with "evolution" as the main exhibition line, leading visitors to gradually appreciate the wonders of nature, from the evolution of the vast universe, the origin of the beautiful planet, and the shaping of diverse landscapes, to exploring how organisms in different habitats have evolved. The museum houses a total of about 6,000 exhibits, including the world's only skeleton specimen of the Chinese dragon, the earliest known jawed fish, the miraculous Xiushan fish, the world's rare three-dimensionally preserved Tianshan Hami pterosaur eggs, evidence of continental drift, the water dragon, and the world's longest-faced and largest individual horse, the Eohippus skull fossil.