“An extraordinary 512-million-year-old fossil site has been discovered in southern China, preserving in vivid detail almost an entire ecosystem from a time shortly after Earth’s first mass extinction event.

The fossils date from the Cambrian period, which began 541 million years ago. The early Cambrian saw an explosion of diversity in animal life which gave rise to most of the major groups alive today.

But this flourishing came to a halt with the Sinsk event around 513.5 million years ago, when oxygen levels in the ocean fell, killing off several groups of animals.

Han Zeng at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China and his colleagues began finding fossils at a quarry in the mountainous region of Huayuan County in Hunan Province in 2021.

So far, they have analysed 8681 fossils from 153 species, nearly 60 per cent of which are new to science. The team has christened this ancient ecosystem the Huayuan biota and say the site is comparable and possibly superior to the most famous Cambrian fossil site, the Burgess Shale in Canada.”

From New Scientist.