Maotianshan: Home to palaeobios from 530 million years ago

As a region with a high degree of bio-diversity worldwide, Yunnan’s Kunming will host the fifteenth session of the Conference of the Parties, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) from October 11 to 24. 

The Chengjiang Fossil Site is located on the north shore of the Fuxian lake in the central Yunnan’s Chengjiang City. The rocks and fossils of the Chengjiang Fossil Site present an outstanding and extraordinarily preserved record that testifies to the rapid diversification of life on Earth during the early Cambrian period, around 530 million years ago. Hailed as “The cradle of life on the earth”, the Chengjiang Fossil Site is one of the earliest records of a complex marine ecosystem and a unique window of early Cambrian communities.

Since the scientist called Hou Xianguang first discovered the fossils in 1984, Mt. Maotianshan has been where the Chengjiang Fossil Site (CFS) is situated and also where the Cambrian explosion took place. In the Cambrian period, the Earth saw “a great flowering of animal life”.

The Cambrian explosion or Cambrian radiation was an event approximately 541 million years ago in the Cambrian period when practically all major animal phyla started appearing in the fossil record. It lasted for about 13 – 25 million years and resulted in the divergence of most modern metazoan phyla. The event was accompanied by major diversifications in other groups of organisms as well.

Back then, the area was a shallow sea and the home to the planet's earliest animals, which roamed freely and thrived. In a sudden, mudslide happened, and many animals were buried alive at the bottom of the sea in a moment. After geological changes, they were raised to form today's mountains.

The discovery of prchistoric bio-life fossils solves the mystiques of the Riot of Life in the Cambrain Period. The CFS vividly reproduces the magnificent landscape of Marine life 530 million years ago and the original features of living animals, providing valuable evidence for the study of the origin, evolution, ecology and other theories of life on early earth.

On July 1, 2012, the CFS was included on the World Heritage List, which is the first World Heritage on fossils in China and even Asia.

The site documents at least sixteen phyla and a variety of enigmatic groups as well as about 200 species of 16 categories, presenting exceptional testimony to the rapid diversification of life on Earth 530 million years ago, when almost all of today’s major animal groups emerged. It is one of the world's top three site for paleontology.

Reporting by Han Yaqiao (Yuxi Release); Trans-editing by Mo Yingyi