The Chengdu Geological College Museum, located inside Chengdu Geological College in Chengdu City of Sichuan Province and covering a total space of 2,000 square meters, is a college-level comprehensive museum of geological science of China. It was built on the basis of the Exhibition Room of the Geological Department of the former Chongqing University. The museum, prepared in 1960 and opened in 1962, is divided into 10 exhibition halls, with a collection of over 20,000 items.
In front of the museum is the Open-air Exhibition Hall. On the terrace of both sides is a rockery piled up with giant ores and geological samples. By the fountain is a stainless steel dinosaur sculpture, 7.42 meters high, with the Mamenxi Dinosaur unearthed at Hechuan as the model.
The best of the rare exhibits displayed in the Comprehensive Hall is the fossil of the Mamenxi Dinosaur unearthed at Hechuan with the length of 22 meters and height of 3.5 meters. It was discovered in the stratum of the later Jurassic Period (140 million years ago), a genuine fossil of lizard-feet dinosaur known to be the largest and most complete one in China so far. The total length of another kind of bird-feet dinosaur renowned for its running speed is only three meters long known as Honghe Yandu (salt capital) Dinosaur. The fossil of Hu's Guizhou Dinosaur, a kind of very valuable small reptile (only 15~30 cm long) born in the sea, belongs to 200 million years ago. There is a fossil of a nest of dinosaur eggs composed of 20 oblong eggs. Also on display are a 3-meter long front tooth of the Oriental Stegodon, the lower jawbone and molar of the Nama Ancient Elephant, 75 cm wide and 50 cm high, and the rare intact fossil of Dazu Chongqing Fish, 55 cm long and 20 cm wide, belonging to 140 million years ago. For reflecting biological evolution and giving a contrast, a number of valuable samples of modern vertebrate are displayed in the Comprehensive Hall, such as the Yangtze River alligator, lesser panda, panda's skull and the skeleton of the modern Asian elephant, 3.37 long and 2.7 meter tall. At the east end of the Hall, various kinds of mineral samples are arrayed according to their uses and industrial types of mineral deposits. The Crystallized Mineral Exhibition Hall displays over 200 kinds of mineral crystals divided in accordance with their physical property and crystal chemistry. The Rock Exhibition Hall displays over 500 samples of various kinds of rocks according to the three major rocks that form the earth's crust. The Mineral Deposit Exhibition Hall displays 40 typical examples of deposits according to the kind of their cause of formation. The Exhibition Hall of Ancient Extinct Animals and Plants is displayed mainly with the classification of invertebrate fossil and plant fossil. The Exhibition Hall of the History of Biological Development summarizes the rules of generation, development and evolution of life on earth through pictures, drawings and charts, models and samples of objects. The Exhibition Rooms of Sedimentation Mark and Sedimentation Mode display mainly the samples of various marks of sediment environments and various kinds of typical sediment modes.
On display in the Middle Hall and the Hallway are the large mineral crystals, grotesque in shape and lustrous in color, the fossils of ancient extinct animals and plants, artworks of jade carving and the utilization of mineral resources. Also on display are the samples of the crystal cluster of green quartz in the shape of malachite, the crystal cluster of calcite in the shape of flowers, the crystal cluster of barite in the shape of jujube flower composed of yellowish monocrystals in the shape of platelet, and the crystal cluster of purple fluorite in the shape of cubic grown with the overlapping crystal cluster of quartz in white fine granular. The rare exhibits from the Three Pole areas of the globe are also on display, the weathered granite in the shape of a honeycomb from the height of 8,000 meters of Mount Qomolangma (known to the West as Mount Everest), the manganese nodule from the depth of 5,000 meters of the Pacific Ocean and the reddish brown jasper in the shape of stripes from the South Pole and the folds in the shape of intestine from the metamorphic rock of the early Cambrian Period in the North Pole. On display there is also a piece of iron-nickel meteoric discovered from Longchang in Sichuan Province, which had a recorded history in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and was worshipped as a wonder in 1761 in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), weighing 158.5 kilograms.
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