500 Million-years-old fossil of over 250 species found in China

A research team has discovered fossils of over 250 species in China, claiming they could be over 500 MILLION-year-old.

The fossils, found in a river delta in modern China, might be of ancestors of many of today’s animals, the study claims.

A new study has found that the ancestors of many animals alive today may have lived in modern China more than 500 million years ago.

The group of fossils found in southwest China is one of the oldest currently known to science.

The fossils that were found at the Chengjiang Biota include numerous worms, arthropods (ancestors of living shrimps, insects, spiders, scorpions) and even the earliest vertebrates (ancestors of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals).

The Yunnan Province area, now on land in the mountains, has been proved to be in marine currents in the past, the study discovered.

Senior author Dr Xiaoya Ma, a palaeobiologist at the University of Exeter and Yunnan University said “The Cambrian Explosion is now universally accepted as a genuine rapid evolutionary event, but the causal factors for this event have been long debated, with hypotheses on environmental, genetic, or ecological triggers.”

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“Storm floods transported these organisms down to the adjacent deep oxygen-deficient settings, leading to the exceptional preservation we see today,” said Changshi Qi, another co-lead author and a geochemist at the Yunnan University.

The discovery of the fossils is important because it shows that our most early animals tolerated stressful conditions, such as fluctuations, high amount of sediment deposition and salinity.