New animal species that survived a mass extinction 500 million years ago found in a quarry in China

Almost a hundred new animal species that survived a mass extinction five hundred million years ago have been discovered in a small quarry in Porcelainthe scientists revealed on Wednesday.

The treasure trove of fossils offers a rare glimpse into a catastrophic event that brought a sudden end to the largest explosion of life in the history of our planet.

The location where the fossils were found in southern China’s Hunan province is “extraordinary,” Han Zeng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told News.

“We have collected more than 50,000 fossil specimens from a single quarry measuring 12 meters high, 30 meters long and eight meters wide,” added the lead author of a new study published in the journal Nature.

In this small space, the Chinese team discovered more than 150 different species (91 of them new to science) between 2021 and 2024.

Han described “wonderful experiences when we realized those animals were right there on the rock.”

“Many fossils show soft parts, such as gills, guts, eyes and even nerves,” he added.

Among the species discovered were ancient relatives of worms, sponges and jellyfish.

They also found many arthropods, a family that includes modern crabs and insects, including spiny, stalk-eyed creatures called radiodonts They were the top predator of the time.

The discovery is especially interesting to scientists because of the era in which these strange animals lived.

The big bang of evolution

Life first emerged on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, but it was little more than a layer of slime for most of our planet’s history.

Then came the Cambrian explosion, known as the “big bang” of evolution, approximately 540 million years ago. Suddenly, most of the major groups of animals alive today (including vertebrates that would eventually include humans) evolved and began populating the world’s oceans.

This burst of life is believed to have been fueled by an increase in oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere.

However, it came to a sudden end when half of all animals died 513 million years ago. This mass extinction, known as the Sinsk event, is believed to have been caused by declining oxygen levels.

The Chinese quarry animals, which date back about 512 million years, represent the first major discovery of soft-bodied fossils that lived immediately after the Sinsk event, Han explained.

This means the fossils, called Huayuan biota after the county where they were found, “open a new window into what happened,” he added.

“We were surprised”

Michael Lee, an evolutionary biologist at the South Australian Museum who was not involved in the research, said: “The new fossils from China demonstrate that the Sinsk event most severely affected shallow-water forms.”

A deep-sea fish called coelacanth It similarly survived the mass extinction that wiped out all the dinosaurs that did not evolve into birds, he noted.

“The deep ocean is one of the most stable environments over geological time, similar to how the basement of a house is protected from daily and seasonal changes and has fewer temperature fluctuations than the attic,” Lee told News.

Han said his team was also surprised that some of the animals from the quarry had also been found in Canada. Burgess Shale site, dating from an early period of the Cambrian explosion.

This suggests that these animals were already able to travel halfway around the world at this early stage, he added.

“We were surprised when we discovered that the Huayuan biota shared several animals with the Burgess Shale, including the arthropods Helmetia and Surusicaris that were previously only known from the Burgess Shale,” Zeng told Reuters. “As larval stages are common in extant marine invertebrates, the best explanation for these shared taxa will be that the larvae of early animals were able to spread by ocean currents from the earliest days of animals in the Cambrian.”

The Sinsk event is not considered one of the most well-known “Big Five” mass extinctions in the history of our planet.

Han said there is evidence of 18 or more mass extinctions in the last 540 million years, and called for more attention to be paid to these immensely destructive events.

Scientists have long debated whether dinosaurs were in decline before a asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago, causing a mass extinction. Recent research suggests that dinosaur populations were continues to thrive in North America before the asteroid impact.

TO research team in 2019 It found that the steroid attack unleashed a chaotic day of fires, earthquakes and tsunamis, leading to a prolonged period of global cooling.