“A treasure trove of fossils uncovered in China challenges the idea that marine animals took millions of years to recover from the world’s worst die-off.
“An exceptionally well-preserved trove of fossils uncovered in southern China represents a complex marine ecosystem from the dawn of modern life, according to a study published in Science today1. The organisms of the Guiyang biota lived around 251 million years ago, just one million years after the world’s worst known mass-extinction event, at the end of the Permian period. This suggests that ecosystems recovered much more rapidly than previously thought.
“Palaeontologist Xu Dai discovered the fossils in 2015, when he was at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. Between 2015 and 2019 — before the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted fieldwork — he and his colleagues collected more than 1,000 fossils of whole fish, ancient lobsters and prehistoric crab-like creatures from a layer of black shale at six sites to the east of Guiyang in Guizhou province.”
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