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(Newser)
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Scientists express their excitement at a new fossil discovery that revisits life half a billion years ago – and could disrupt our vision of evolution, guardian reports. Reported in Science, the Qingjiang site in China includes at least 4,351 fossils representing 101 species, including 53 new ones for science. Primitive sponges, algae, jellyfish and other creatures are also captured in incredible detail, with visible details of the mouth, eyes, muscles and gills. And they date back to a vital period, the Cambrian explosion, when animal life broke out on Earth and rooted in the tree of life. Fossils "help us understand how complex organs such as brains could be assembled through evolutionary processes in the blind," says Martin Smith, a paleontologist not involved in the project.
Like all Cambrian life, these small, slimy spots lived at sea, but were forever changed by a stream of mud that swept them into colder, deeper waters, leaving them buried in sediments containing little water. oxygen to cause decomposition, according to Phys.org. "Quality of preservation is mind-blowing," says Martin, who describes fossils as having "finer details than a human hair". The author of the study, Dongjing Fu, and his co-author, Xingliang Zhang, discovered the site in 2007 by digging in shale at the edge of a river. dig up fossils, National Geographic reports. The discovery has now been compared to two earlier Cambrian fossil sites, Burgess Shale dating back 508 million years in Canada and 518 million years old in Chengiang, China. "I can see a bright future," says Fu. "Qingjiang will be the next shale of Burgess." (Read more fossil stories.)
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