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About Liaoning:
For most of the 20th century, paleontologists pointed to Archaeopteryx as the prototypical "intermediate form" between dinosaurs and birds. That all changed in 1996, when Chinese researchers discovered the exquisitely preserved remains of a small theropod (subsequently named Sinosauropteryx) at a quarry in Liaoning near the North Korean border--the first dinosaur known to have had primitive feathers.
Since then, Liaoning has proven to be an almost embarrassingly rich source of "dino-birds," with the discovery (and naming) of dozens of genera. As with many important fossil sites around the world--such as Solnhofen in Germany and Las Hoyas in Spain--this region of northeastern China seems to have been a peaceful lake in early Cretaceous times, and supported a complex ecosystem of dinosaurs, birds, fish and mammals. When some of these creatures died, they floated to the lake's bottom, where they were preserved by the silt (many of the fossils at Liaoning also appear to have been buried by sudden, deadly rains of volcanic ash).
Liaoning provides a valuable "snapshot" of a 130-million-year-old ecosystem, but you might say that this snapshot was taken in slow motion: the dino-birds that lived here during the early Cretaceous period ranged all along the evolutionary spectrum, some (like Sinornithosaurus) more on the "dinosaur" end and some (like Caudipteryx) more on the "bird" end.
