In an attempt to gain healing powers, villagers in central China boiled a ton of dinosaur bones into soup or ground them to a powder for traditional medicine. They believe that the bones belong to flying dragons had special powers.

According to AP reports, these fossils were being sold in the Henan province as "dragon bones" at about 4 yuan (50 cents) per kilogram (2.2 pounds). Villagers also feed the calcium-rich bones, boiled with other ingredients to children as a treatment for dizziness and leg cramps.

The practice of grounding the bones to make a paste to apply directly to fractures and other injuries had been going on for at least two decades. In Henan's Ruyang County, scientists have recently excavated a 60-foot-long plant-eating dinosaur, which lived 85 million to 100 million years ago.