site in 1965|380x380px Yang was born in
Hua County, Shaanxi, China. He graduated from the Department of Geology of
Peking University in 1923, and in 1927 received his doctorate from the
University of Munich in Germany. In 1928 he worked for the
Cenozoic Research Laboratory of the
Geological Survey of China and took charge of excavations at the
Peking Man Site at
Zhoukoudian. He held professorial posts at the Geological Survey of China,
Peking University, and
Northwest University in Xi'an. Yang's scientific work was instrumental in the creation of China's
Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in
Beijing, which today houses one of the most important collections of fossil vertebrates in the world. He was director of both the IVPP and the
Beijing Natural History Museum. He supervised the collection of fossil remains of and research on dinosaurs in
China from 1933 until the 1970s. He presided over some of the most important fossil discoveries in history, such as those of the
prosauropods
Lufengosaurus and
Yunnanosaurus, the
ornithopod Tsintaosaurus, and the gigantic
sauropod Mamenchisaurus, as well as China's first
stegosaur,
Chialingosaurus. ==Legacy==