Amazing stuff!
"Paleontologists have published their first comprehensive analysis of a giant fossil site in southern China containing the remains of a 512-million-year-old marine ecosystem. The team analyzed thousands of specimens from the site representing 153 species—nearly 60 percent of them new to science."
"The fossils date from the Cambrian period, which began 541 million years ago. The early Cambrian saw an explosion of diversity in animal life which gave rise to most of the major groups alive today.
But this flourishing came to a halt with the Sinsk event around 513.5 million years ago, when oxygen levels in the ocean fell, killing off several groups of animals.
Han Zeng at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China and his colleagues began finding fossils at a quarry in the mountainous region of Huayuan County in Hunan Province in 2021.
So far, they have analysed 8681 fossils from 153 species, nearly 60 per cent of which are new to science. ..."
From the abstract:
"Cambrian Burgess Shale-type (BST) fossil biotas document nearly complete snapshots of the oldest Phanerozoic marine ecosystems. However, the rarity of deposits bearing high-diversity BST biotas has restricted our understanding of the evolutionary and ecological dynamics of the Cambrian explosion.
Here we report the Huayuan biota—a lower Cambrian (Stage 4, approximately 512 million years ago) BST Lagerstätte from an outer shelf, deep-water setting of the Yangtze Block in Hunan, South China.
The Huayuan biota yields remarkable taxonomic richness, comprising 153 animal species of 16 phylum-level clades dominated by arthropods, poriferans and cnidarians, among which 59% of species are new. The biota is comprised overwhelmingly of soft-bodied forms that include preserved cellular tissues.
The complex ecosystem contained diverse radiodonts and pelagic tunicates, filling a gap of high-diversity BST biotas from the Cambrian Stage 4.
Critically, multivariate ordination based on a global dataset of Cambrian BST biotas places the Huayuan biota within a main transition of marine animal ecosystems between Cambrian Age 3 and Age 4.
Network analysis reveals close faunal connections between the Huayuan and Burgess Shale biotas, indicating transoceanic dispersal. Dated shortly after the Sinsk event, the Huayuan biota illuminates differences in the impacts of this extinction in shallow- versus deep-water settings during the first Phanerozoic mass extinction and offers critical insights into the transformation of global ecosystems in the early Cambrian."
Huayuan Biota Decodes Earth’s First Phanerozoic Mass Extinction (original news release)
A Cambrian soft-bodied biota after the first Phanerozoic mass extinction (no public access)
Fossil excavation in the field
Soft-bodied fossils from the Huayuan biota
No comments:
Post a Comment