30,000 Soft-Bodied Fossils Found In China Shed Light On Life Evolution 500 Million Years Ago

A. Sutherland – MessageToEagle.com – During the Cambrian period, approximately 500 million years ago, animal life appeared on earth in great diversity.

Now researchers have discovered plenty of amazing fossils on the bank of the Danshui River in China. Many organisms are unknown to science.

These fascinating fossils are a great competitor to the famous Burgess Shale slate, located in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and famous for its superb fossils of soft-bodied organisms.

New soft-bodied taxa from the Qingjiang biota. source

However, “the Qingjiang biota is 10 million years older than the Burgess Shale, closer to initial diversification of metazoans,” or multicellular animals, said Xingliang Zhang, a geologist at Northwest University in Xi’an, China, and lead researcher on the project.

Specimens were found almost perfectly preserved, with clearly reproduced eyes, guts and other soft parts of the body. The paleontological site was named by researchers – Qingjiang.

Researchers dug into the true deposit of fossils that lived over 500 million years ago. So far, researchers have analyzed about 4,000 specimens of all the 30,000 excavated from the site.

Already now, they say that the fossils represent a a complex and diverse ecosystem. Jellyfish seem to be abundant at the site, and around 85% of them are soft-body creatures.

Soft-Bodied Fossils. source

A remarkable 85% of the specimens are entirely soft-bodied animals, preserved in exquisite detail.

Allison Daley, a paleontologist at the University of Lausanne, said that Qingjiang is among the paleontological sites with its exceptional abundance of fossil materials.

Unlike other formations from the Cambrian period, the fossil-bearing layers at the Qingjiang site remained immune to metamorphosis, a process when intense heat and pressure result in chemical changes in the fossilized bodies and their surrounds.

Most important in this discovery is that the fossils found at Qingjiang confirm the theory of the so-called Cambrian explosion of life.

It was 541 million years ago when many complex species suddenly appeared on our planet.

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Written by – A. Sutherland  – AncientPages.com Senior Staff Writer