Shanshan County

Shanshan County (Chinese: 鄯善县) as the official romanized name, also transliterated from Uyghur as Piqan County (Uyghur: پىچان ناھىيىسى; Chinese: 皮羌县), is a county within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and is under the administrative jurisdiction of the prefecture-level city of Turpan. It contains an area of 39,548 km (15,270 sq mi), occupying the eastern majority of Turpan. According to the 2002 census, it has a population of 210,000. The county seat is in Shanshan Town. The county is named after the ancient Shanshan Kingdom, although the kingdom was actually located mostly outside of the borders of the modern county, in the Lop Nur area. The place was originally named Piqian, and the Grand coordinator and provincial governor of Xinjiang proposed the name of Shanshan when Guangxu Emperor decided to set up a county in 1902. The local geology and the desert climate made it possible to discover a number of important fossil sites in the area, including China's largest cluster of fossilized dinosaur tracks and China's largest dinosaur. Important dinosaur sites are associated with the Lianmuqin Formation (named after Lianmuqin Town) and the Subashi Formation (named after Subashi Village (42°55′16″N 89°44′39″E / 42.9212°N 89.7441°E / 42.9212; 89.7441) in Tuyugou Township (吐峪沟乡). The Shanshanosaurus is named after Shanshan. In 2008–2011, a team of German and Chinese paleontologists discovered and studied an "enormous" accumulation of Jurassic turtle fossils at a site they nicknamed "Mesa Chelonia", approximately 25 km (16 mi) NNE of Shanshan Town.