On April 7th, the Paleontological Society of China released in Nanjing its list of Top Ten Items of Progress in Paleontology in 2019. The investigation into “A Burgess Shale-type fossil Lagerstätte from the early Cambrian Period in South China” earned for the NWU Early Life and Environment Innovation Research Team the Number One spot.
The NWU Early Life and Environment Innovation Research Team members, Zhang Xingliang, Fu Dongjing, et al, discovered, for the first time, a 518 million-year-old Burgess Shale-type fossil lagerstatten, in the Changyang area of Hubei Province. The team named it the “Qingjiang Biota”.
This achievement was detailed in the March 2019 edition of Science and came to be a landmark in the field of evolutionary paleobiology by the academic circle.
The Biota ranks among the first class in biological diversity, owing to the proportions of the new taxa, soft-body biota and fidelity to the subject it preserves. Their subsequent research is expected to fill in the gaps in the human understanding of the Cambrian Explosion and find solutions to a series of scientific questions about the origin and evolution of toxonomy.
This is the 14th paper, since 1996, published in Nature or Science by the team, led by Shu Degan, an academician of Chinese Academy of Science.