title: Yang Zhongjian
text: Yang Zhongjian, also Yang Chung-chien (; 1 June 1897 – 15 January 1979), courtesy name Keqiang (), also known as C.C. (Chung Chien) Young, was a Chinese paleontologist and zoologist. He was one of China's foremost vertebrate paleontologists. He has been called the "Father of Chinese Vertebrate Paleontology".
  
  Biography
  
  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
  
  Yang's cremated remains are interred behind the museum at the Zhoukoudian site alongside those of his colleagues, Pei Wenzhong and Jia Lanpo.
  
  In 2007, when Lü Junchang and colleagues described a second species of Yunnanosaurus, they named it Yunnanosaurus youngi in Yang's honour.
  
  References
  
  Further reading
   
  
  1897 births
  1979 deaths
  20th-century Chinese zoologists
  Chinese paleontologists
  Academic staff of Beijing Normal University
  Biologists from Shaanxi
  Academic staff of Chongqing University
  Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni
  Members of Academia Sinica
  Members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences
  Academic staff of the Northwest University (China)
  Paleontology in Shaanxi
  National University of Peking alumni
  Academic staff of Peking University
  People from Weinan
  Victims of the Cultural Revolution