A CUG team led by Prof. SONG Haijun, with other research institutions from home and abroad, published “A Mesozoic fossil lagerstätte from 250.8 million years ago shows a modern-type marine ecosystem” in Science on February10, 2023. The Guiyang Biota, which is an fossil, demonstrates the rapid rise of modern-type marine ecosystems after the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. The first author is Dr. DAI Xu and Prof. SONG is the corresponding author.
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Some of the fossils of the Guiyang Biota
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Taxonomic composition and species richness of the main Triassic biotas
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Artistic reconstruction of the Guiyang Biota (illustration by YANG Dinghua)
This is the comment from the reviewer of the paper: the Triassic recovery of life from the devastating end-Permian mass extinction was an amazing period of evolution. Whether biodiversity had to rebuild from near annihilation or from refugia is a matter of conjecturebut recovery heralded the development of recognizably modern ecosystems. Dai et al. present examples of diverse fishes, ammonoids, bivalves, protists, and malacostracan arthropods from a fossil site dated approximately 1 million years after the crisis. These fossil assemblages, particularly the presence of vertebrate predators, reveal a surprisingly early diversity of animals after the end-Permian mass extinction.
(Edited and translated from the Chinese version)