Cache in Chinese Mountain Reveals 20,000 Prehistoric Fossils

A giant cache of nearly 20,000 fossil reptiles, shellfish and a host of other prehistoric creatures unearthed from a mountain in China is now revealing how life recovered after the most devastating mass extinction on Earth.

This research could help point out which species might be more or less susceptible to extinction nowadays, and how the world might recover from the damage caused by humanity, scientists added.

Life was nearly completely wiped out approximately 250 million years ago by massive volcanic eruptions and devastating global warming.

Only one in 10 species survived this cataclysmic end-Permian event.
Much was uncertain regarding the steps life took to piece itself back together after this disaster, or even how long it took.

Now the clearest picture yet of this recovery has been discovered by a team of researchers, who excavated away half a mountain in Luoping in southwest China to unearth thousands of marine fossils, the first fully functional ecosystem seen after the end-Permian.

“The pattern and timing of recovery can tell us something about how life today might recover after human-induced crises,” said researcher Michael Benton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England.

A trove of fossils

The 50-foot-thick (16 meters) layer of limestone that held these fossils dates back to when south China was a large island just north of the equator with a tropical climate. A smattering of fossil land plants suggest this marine community lived near a conifer forest.

The fossils are exceptionally well-preserved, with more than half of them completely intact, including soft tissues. Apparently they were protected across the ages by mats of microbes that rapidly sealed their bodies off from decay after death.

“Soft tissues can give us more profound information about larger patterns of evolution and relationships, such as the feathers on dinosaurs,” Benton said. “Soft tissues in some of the marine creatures may help us understand diet and locomotion.”

Ninety percent of the fossils are bug-like creatures, such as crustaceans, millipedes and horseshoe crabs. Fish make up 4 percent, including the “living fossil” known as the coelacanth, which is still alive today nearly 250 million years later.

Snails, bivalves (creatures including clams and oysters), squid-like belemnoids, nautilus-like ammonoids and other mollusks make up about 2 percent of the fossils.

The largest creature the scientists found was a thalattosaur, a marine reptile about 10 feet (3 meters) in length, which would have preyed on the larger fishes there, which reached lengths of about 3 feet (1 m). Other predatory marine reptiles the scientists found include dolphin-bodied ichthyosaurs.

“Every time we find a new site like this, we get closer to what life in the past was really like,” Benton told LiveScience.

A long time to heal

This extraordinarily detailed snapshot of a diverse bygone ecosystem reveals that life took a long time to heal from the massive damage it received — 10 million years, which is even more than it took life to recover after the K-T event that claimed the dinosaurs.

“Recovery after most mass extinctions, including the K-T, seems to have taken 1 million to 4 million years,” Benton said. “The end-Permian event was so profound, killing perhaps 90 percent of species, that ecosystems had nothing left to hang their structure on.”

“The importance of the discovery that ecosystems took 10 million years to recover completely reflects the unequalled severity of the event,” Benton said.

Some marine animals such as the ammonoids did recover fast, within 1 million to 2 million years, but “physical environmental conditions continued to suffer setbacks for the 4 million to 5 million years of the Early Triassic, with four or five pulses of sudden heating and ocean stagnation,” Benton said, referring to severe climate changes and reduced ocean water circulation.

“The Luoping site and evidence from older locations in south China shows that ecosystems in total had not recovered until some 10 million years after the crisis.”

The researchers now plan to explore the recovery over the ecosystem’s entire life span to see which species recovered when and how the food web rebuilt itself. In addition, “we hope to now explore all the amazing fossil organisms from Luoping — this has only just begun and will take many years to document in detail,” Benton said.

500-Million-Year-Old Sea Creature With Limbs Under Its Head Unearthed

Scientists have unearthed extraordinarily preserved fossils of a 520-million-year-old sea creature, one of the earliest animal fossils ever found, according to a new study.

The fossilized animal, an arthropod called a fuxhianhuiid, has primitive limbs under its head, as well as the earliest example of a nervous system that extended past the head.

The primitive creature may have used the limbs to push food into its mouth as it crept across the seafloor. The limbs may shed light on the evolutionary history of arthropods, which include crustaceans and insects.

“Since biologists rely heavily on organization of head appendages to classify arthropod groups, such as insects and spiders, our study provides a crucial reference point for reconstructing the evolutionary history and relationships of the most diverse and abundant animals on Earth,” said study co-author Javier Ortega-Hernández, an earth scientist at the University of Cambridge, in a statement. “This is as early as we can currently see into arthropod limb development.”

Primordial animal

The fuxhianhuiid lived nearly 50 million years before animals first emerged from the sea onto land, during the early part of the Cambrian explosion, when simple multicellular organisms rapidly evolved into complex sea life. [See Images of the Wacky Cambrian Creatures ]

While paleontologists have unearthed previous examples of a fuxhianhuiid before, the fossils were all found in the head-down position, with their delicate internal organs obscured by a large carapace or shell.

However, when Ortega-Hernández and his colleagues began excavating in a fossil-rich region of southwest China around Kunming called Xiaoshiba, they unearthed several specimens of fuxhianhuiid where the bodies had been flipped before fossilization.

All told, the team unearthed an amazingly preserved arthropod, as well as eight additional specimens.

These primeval creatures probably spent most of their days crawling across the seabed trawling for food and may have also been able to swim short distances. The sea creatures, some of the earliest arthropods or jointed animals, probably evolved from worms with legs.

The discovery sheds light on how some of the earliest ancestors of today’s animals may have evolved.

“These fossils are our best window to see the most primitive state of animals as we know them – including us,” Ortega-Hernández said in a statement.

“Before that there is no clear indication in the fossil record of whether something was an animal or a plant – but we are still filling in the details, of which this is an important one.”

A Fossil Spider Discovery Just Turned Out to Be a Crayfish With Some Legs Painted on

When scientists at the Dalian Natural History Museum in China copped a load of a fossil unearthed in the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation, they couldn’t believe their eyes. The eight-legged beastie looked like nothing anyone had seen before. Exceptionally preserved.

They described it as a new spider, publishing their analysis in the journal Acta Geologica Sinica, and named the species Mongolarachne chaoyangensis. There was just one problem: the fossil was a big old fake.

The cunning ruse was discovered by invertebrate paleontologist Paul Selden of the University of Kansas, whose spidey senses started tingling when he got his hands on the paper.

“I was obviously very sceptical,” Selden said.

“The paper had very few details, so my colleagues in Beijing borrowed the specimen from the people in the Southern University, and I got to look at it. Immediately, I realised there was something wrong with it – it clearly wasn’t a spider. It was missing various parts, had too many segments in its six legs, and huge eyes.”

The penny dropped, he said, when palaeobiologist Chungkun Shih of Capital Normal University in Beijing remarked that a lot of Cretaceous crayfish are found in the same formation, dating back to around 120 to 130 million years ago.

“I realised what happened,” Selden said, “was I got a very badly preserved crayfish onto which someone had painted on some legs.”

Yep. Those wacky legs that didn’t look right? Not actually fossilised material at all.

To confirm this suspicion, Selden teamed up with University of Kansas geologists Matt Downen and Alison Olcott to analyse the fossil specimen using fluorescence microscopy. Because the fossil was so big, they had to image it in sections.

These images returned four main fluorescence colours: white, which likely indicated a mended crack; blue, which is the mineral composition of the host rock; red, indicating actual fossilised material; and yellow. That yellow fluorescence, the researchers said, is most likely created by oil-based paint.

But it’s a very convincing forgery. You wouldn’t necessarily know parts of it were fake just by looking at it, unless you specifically knew what you were looking for. That, Selden said, is how the Dalian Natural History Museum scientists were taken in.

“These things are dug up by local farmers mostly, and they see what money they can get for them,” he explained.

“They obviously picked up this thing and thought, ‘Well, you know, it looks a bit like a spider.’ And so, they thought they’d paint on some legs – but it’s done rather skilfully. So, at first glance, or from a distance, it looks pretty good.

“It’s not until you get down to the microscope and look in detail that you realise there are clearly things wrong with it. And, of course, the people who described it are perfectly good palaeontologists – they’re just not experts on spiders.”

Fake fossils are nothing new; in fact, recent history – going back the last few centuries – is rife with hoaxes and frauds. And, although we did eventually wise up about the Piltdown Man, a 2010 Science investigation found that fake fossils were finding their way into museums in China in shocking numbers.

Farther afield, the online marketplace for trilobite fossils, for instance, is awash with extremely clever fakes.

“I’ve seen lots of forgeries, and in fact I’ve even been taken in by fossils in a very dark room in Brazil,” Selden said.

“It looks interesting until you get to it in the daylight the next day and realise it’s been enhanced, let’s say, for sale. I have not seen it with Chinese invertebrates before.

“It’s very common with, you know, really expensive dinosaurs and that sort of stuff… They’re not necessarily going to be bought by scientists, but by tourists.”

While it’s less common to find a fake fossil in an academic journal, the case highlights the importance of performing a thorough analysis, and that even the peer-review process can be flawed.

As a result of this new paper, Mongolarachne chaoyangensis no longer exists; the specimen has been reclassified as a common crayfish. As for what will become of the fossil, that’s yet to be decided. Perhaps it will be put on display in a museum.