Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan

Assembled from 33 blocks · 1 evidence · 19 related

1. Story
2. A Cambrian Lagerstätte in the Maotianshan Shales near Chengjiang in Yunnan Province, southwest China, found by Hou Xianguang in 1984 and roughly ten million years older than the Burgess Shale at about 518 million years. Chengjiang matters for two reasons that the Burgess Shale cannot supply on its own. First, it preserves a comparably diverse soft-bodied fauna on the opposite side of the Cambrian world, which shows that the Burgess assemblage is not a local peculiarity. Second, being older, it sits closer to the radiation itself, and it contains the earliest widely accepted chordates — Myllokunmingia and Haikouichthys, small fish-like animals with what appear to be a notochord, myomeres and gill structures. Preservation at Chengjiang differs chemically from the Burgess Shale, with soft tissues often replicated in iron-rich minerals rather than as carbon films, which means the two deposits filter their faunas differently and comparing them is not straightforward. The site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012.
3. Knowledge
4. Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
5. Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan
6. The Cambrian explosion
7. Connections
8. The Cambrian explosion
9. Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
10. The Cambrian explosion
11. Hou Xianguang finds the Chengjiang fauna
12. Molecular clock dating
13. Ediacara Hills, Flinders Ranges
14. Fortune Head GSSP, Newfoundland
15. Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
16. Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
17. Anomalocaris
18. Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan
19. The Great Oxidation Event
20. The end-Ordovician mass extinction
21. Fortune Head GSSP, Newfoundland
22. Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
23. Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan
24. Anomalocaris
25. Konservat-Lagerstätte (exceptional preservation)
26. Molecular clock dating
27. The Cambrian explosion
28. Burgess Shale, Yoho National Park
29. Chengjiang fossil site, Yunnan
30. The Cambrian explosion
31. Hou Xianguang finds the Chengjiang fauna
32. Evidence
33. Supports the stage and period boundary ages used throughout this pack, including the Cambrian base at 538.8 ± 0.2 Ma on recent editions against 541.0 ± 1.0 Ma on earlier ones. V55 verification basis: this session had no network access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked and the WebSearch budget was exhausted — so the cited work was not retrieved and its pagination was not re-checked. No chart edition was opened, so the boundary figures are quoted from standing knowledge of the chart rather than read from it, and the edition in which the Cambrian base changed is not identified.