Chengjiang museum tells you the origin of life

Who am I? Where do humans come from? Come to the natural museum of Chengjiang fossil site in central Yunnan's Mt. Maotianshan and find out the answer to the ultimate philosophical proposition of mankind.

"This is the most precious treasure of our museum -- Kunming fish, " said a staff member at the natural museum of Chengjiang fossil site. Visitors stepped into the museum for a peek into life’s past from “Kunming fish to man".

The fossil of "Kunming fish" is the earliest vertebrate found so far, which provides an important basis for the evolution from fish to man. These findings have solved the mystery of how the Cambrian explosion created on Earth, and provided crucial evidence for Darwin's "The Descent of Man" to solve the mystery of the origin of mankind's major basic organs, answering the question "Who am I? Where do I come from?'”

The Chengjiang site is located near the city of Kunming in central Yunnan Province. A large amount of of mudstone sediment is exposed, yielding many excellently preserved soft-bodied creatures of the Cambrian Explosion. Dated at 525 million years ago, it lies just above the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary at 544 million years ago.

Chengjiang Fossil Site ranks as one of the most important Lagerstätten fossil sites in the world, recording the early establishment of a complex marine ecosystem in the Cambrian Period of 530 million years ago, systematically displaying over 200 fossil species of 16 phyla.

It not only provides precious evidence for the origin and evolution of early forms of life, but it also challenges Darwin's biological evolutionary theory. Chengjiang Fossil Site was listed on the World Heritage List by UNESCO on July 1, 2012. The discovery of Chengjiang fossils is among the most important discoveries of the 21st century.

Built in February 2014, the museum opened for public on August 10, 2020 and it has received over 600,000 visitors. Covering the area of 180,000 square meters, it collected more than 60,000 specimens in the world, among which there are 50,000 Chengjiang fossils and the other 10,000 are from other periods.

The museum displays the anatomies of hard and soft tissues of various organisms, invertebrate and vertebrate, and it boasts the best-preserved ancient fossils of its kind in the world. More remarkably, the major remote ancestors of today's animals are found in Chengjiang Fossil Site, and some fossil species are found nowhere else in the world, which is of great benefit to research on the bio-physiological structures and ecological environment during the Cambrian Period.

The museum enables us to see the original appearances of the oldest creatures on the earth, from which we know the earth has been swarming with various creatures since the Cambrian Period.

At the same time, modern photoelectric technology and advanced multimedia equipments, such as VR (virtual reality), AR (Augmented Reality) and OLED (organic light-emitting diode), are applied to demonstrate the real situation of Cambrian life explosion and the evolution of life on earth.

Reporting by Li Anting, Wang Dan (Yunnan Net); Trans-editing by Mo Yingyi