A bullet train speeds during its debut near a railway station in Shanghai. File photo
| Photo Credit: Reuters

China on September 29 opened its first cross-sea bullet train, linking major cities in the southeastern Fujian province.

The bullet trains — or high-speed rail (HSR) as they are called in China — will travel at the same 350 km per hour speed as other trains on the network.

The new track, which links five cities in Fujian, including capital Fuzhou and business-hub Xiamen, includes portions along a cross-sea bridge, running right across the strait from Taiwan. The over-sea segment covers around 20 km of the total 277 km route.

China’s HSR network is already the world’s largest. A further 2,500 km will be added to the network this year, taking the total length to 44,500 km, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported, with plans to reach 50,000 km of HSR by 2025.

The entire network comprises newly built track to accommodate the faster bullet trains. The first route, connecting Beijing and Tianjin, went online in 2008.

The latest phase of expansion is covering China’s remote and sprawing western regions, with new tracks being opened in Tibet, Xinjiang and Sichuan.

The railways suffered a financial hit during three years of the stringent zero-COVID policy that had imposed restrictions on travel, but this year it is expecting a boom with the coming weeks marking the first national holiday “golden week” post-Covid, starting this weekend. The railways said they expect “190 million train trips to be taken from September 27 to October 8,” the SCMP reported.

A reconstruction of the bird-like dinosaur Fujianvenator prodigiosus.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

About 148 to 150 million years ago, a strange pheasant-sized and bird-like dinosaur with elongated legs and arms built much like wings inhabited southeastern China, with a puzzling anatomy suggesting it either was a fast runner or lived a lifestyle like a modern wading bird.

Scientists said on September 6 they unearthed in Fujian Province the fossil of a Jurassic Period dinosaur they named Fujianvenator prodigiosus – a creature that sheds light on a critical evolutionary stage in the origin of birds.

The question of whether the Fujianvenator, with its curious mixture of skeletal features, should be classified as a bird depends on how one defines a bird, according to study leader Min Wang, a palaeontologist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A remarkable event in dinosaur evolution came when small feathered two-legged dinosaurs from a lineage known as theropods gave rise to birds late in the Jurassic, with the oldest-known bird – Archaeopteryx – dating to roughly 150 million years ago in Germany.

Fujianvenator is a member of a grouping called avialans that includes all birds and their closest non-avian dinosaur relatives, Mr. Wang said. Despite their modest beginnings, birds survived the asteroid strike 66 million years ago that doomed their non-avian dinosaur comrades.

The Fujianvenator fossil, discovered last October, is fairly complete but lacks the animal’s skull and parts of its feet, making it hard to interpret its diet and lifestyle.

Fujianvenator’s lower leg bone – the tibia – was twice as long as its thigh bone – the femur. Such dimensions are unique among theropods; it also had a long bony tail.

“The forelimb is generally built like a bird’s wing, but with three claws on the fingers, which are absent from modern birds. So you can call it wing. It cannot be determined whether it could fly or not,” Mr. Wang said.

“The fossil itself does not preserve feathers. However, its closest relatives and nearly all the known avialan theropods have feathers … Therefore, it would not be a surprise if Fujianvenator had feathers,” Mr. Wang added.

Scientists are seeking a better understanding of the origin of birds as well as non-avian dinosaurs with bird-like traits.

The earliest chapters in the history of birds remain murky due to a fossils shortage. After Archaeopteryx – a crow-sized bird with teeth, a long bony tail, and no beak – there is a canyon of about 20 million years before the next birds appear in the fossil record.