Jiaxian Fossil Museum

A small municipal museum in Jiaxian, Kaohsiung, opened in 1994 to display fossils from the surrounding hills, which are almost entirely marine sedimentary rock. The district holds nine principal fossil beds, and specimens can be picked up along the bed of the Nanzixian River (楠梓仙溪). Its 6,000 specimens are mostly fish and shellfish from the shallow sea that once covered this part of Taiwan, among them Perotrochus chiasienus, a slit shell named after the district. The collection was assembled by Zeng Deming (曾德明), a local fossil hunter who served as the first director and has a barracuda, Sphyraena tsengi, named for him. Visitors dropped away after Typhoon Morakot severed the roads into the mountains in 2009, and by 2022 the museum was drawing 5,000 people a year against the 360,000 at Zuozhen Fossil Park across the border in Tainan, its displays aging and the building without air conditioning. Local government interest in funding a renovation amounted to nothing and it appears as if the museum closed around 2023.