Recently, Professor ZHANG Zhifei of Northwest University (NWU) guided doctoral student HU Yazhou and team members, in collaboration with guest researchers Timothy Topper and Luke Strotz, as well as Researcher LI Guoxiang and Dr. PAN Bing from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS), conducted a systematic study on the sclerites of Chancelloria recovered from the early Cambrian Houjiashan Formation on the North China Platform. The findings were published as a highlighted cover paper in GEOLOGY, a prominent journal of the Geological Society of America. The team discovered evidence hidden in 500-million-year-old fossils for the earliest epithelial tissue-controlled skeletal growth in animals, reshaping our understanding of early animals.
Peer reviewers considered the highlight of this research to be the application of modern biomineralization principles to early shell fossils and the revelation of the complexity of animal microstructures during the Cambrian Explosion through interdisciplinary research methods. It represents the first discovery of true epithelium associated with mineralized structures during the Cambrian Exploitation, indicating that even some relatively lower-order problematic animals possessed the capability to form complex mineralized skeletons similar to those of modern higher animals as early as the initial stage of the Cambrian Explosion.
This research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China Innovative Research Group Project, among other grants. The achievements were published as the highlighted cover paper in the October 2025 issue of GEOLOGY, the renowned journal of the Geological Society of America.
