Xu Xing was born in 1969 in Xinyuan county, in China's remote Xinjiang region, and had never heard of dinosaurs before enrolling at Peking University at eighteen -- he was simply assigned to the paleontology department, without knowing much about the subject. He completed a B.S. in Geology in 1992 and later a Ph.D. at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing in 2002, spending 2003-2005 as a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History.[2]
Based at IVPP for his career, Xu has described and named more dinosaur species than any other paleontologist, living or dead -- more than 80 as of the mid-2020s. His discoveries range enormously in scale: the nine-meter feathered tyrannosaur Yutyrannus huali, the cat-sized Xixianykus zhangi, and the single-clawed Linhenykus monodactylus. Along with colleagues working China's fossil-rich Liaoning beds, his research has been central to establishing that feathers were widespread across the dinosaur family tree, not a late or marginal trait confined to birds' closest relatives.[1][2]
Xu continues to lead fieldwork and description work at IVPP, and was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2023. His career is frequently cited as emblematic of China's rise as a center of paleontological research, alongside the Liaoning fossil beds that supplied much of his material.[2]