The Daqing Museum holds one of the most significant Quaternary fossil collections in China, with over 100,000 specimens accumulated from excavations across the Songhua-Liao Plain. The centrepiece exhibits are two near-complete mammoth skeletons — among the best-preserved in northeast Asia — along with woolly rhinoceros remains, giant deer, and other Pleistocene megafauna that inhabited this area until roughly 10,000 years ago.
The museum is a different kind of attraction from the Petroleum Museum, and visiting both in the same day gives Daqing an unexpected depth. The fossil collection demonstrates that the industrial plain now covered in oilfields and refineries was, not so long ago, a landscape of tundra and steppe populated by creatures of genuinely spectacular size. The permanent exhibits are well laid out with bilingual signage in Chinese and English, and there are regular temporary exhibitions on related topics in natural history and local archaeology.