The investigators discovered a large fossil group in ancient times in Luoping County, Yunnan Province, China, which included more than 20,000 fossils including plants, carnivorous fish and large reptiles.
Fossil seekers know that what they discovered this time is a marine ecosystem belonging to the distant past. This is a lost world. It is the rebirth of the earth after the worst biological extinction event. The fossil group discovered this time is located on a hillside in Luoping County. It represents the first ecosystem recovery after the biological extinction event 252 million years ago. The mass extinction almost wiped out the phenomenon of life from the earth.
These well-preserved fossils include mollusks, sea urchins, and arthropods, as well as large carnivores that occupied the top of the marine food chain at the time, such as the earliest ichthyosaurs, and carnivorous marine reptiles that were 4 meters long.
In these fossil groups, the researchers also found some precious "fragments": fossils derived from terrestrial organisms. These include the stumps of a coniferous plant and the teeth of a primitive land reptile.
After these animals die, their bones accumulate on the sea floor, and the crust changes with time. The ocean sediments were buried in layers and eventually exposed to the water. Hundreds of millions of years later, it became the seat of Luoping County in Yunnan Province.
In the earth ’s 4.5 billion year history, there have been several mass extinctions. But the mass extinction that occurred at the turn of the Permian and Triassic (about 251 million years ago) is undoubtedly the most serious one in terms of scale. In that incident, about 96% of marine life and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates went extinct. Because of the scale and depth of its extinction, it was called "the great dying" by paleontologists.
It is believed that it is precisely because of the volcanic eruption that lasted 500,000 years that a large amount of chemicals and gases were released into the atmosphere, which severely changed the balance of the atmosphere and the entire ecosystem.
"The first consequence of this incident is a sharp global warming. This result will cause the normal global ocean current system to be disrupted or terminated. On the land, due to the massive discharge of carbon dioxide and other acid gases, acid rain will ravage, it will destroy "Remove all forests and leave the ground barren," Benton said. "This is the worst extinction event in history, and life has almost disappeared from the earth."
Those hard-to-survive creatures became the fire for species recovery within the next 10 million years. These species are sometimes called "catastrophic species" by scientists. They survive tenaciously in barren and barren areas that are difficult to survive, lack food, change temperature, and lack breathable oxygen in the air.
Through detailed research on these fossils, Benton and his colleagues, as well as scientists from the Chengdu Institute of Geology and Mineral Resources and the University of Western Australia, are trying to understand how life survived and recovered in such a severe environment. Benton said: "The question of biological recovery after the mass extinction is very relevant to our current concerns. We want to know why some organisms will be doomed to extinction while others have not? Those organisms have been recovered after the mass extinction? How did you rebuild the system after it was destroyed? How long does it take? "Details of this study have been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
The situation of the Luoping County Fossil Group shows that many small creatures at the bottom of the food chain have recovered within 2 to 3 million years after the mass extinction. Once their numbers have stabilized, the upper organisms that feed on them have also begun to recover, including mollusks and shellfish. Among them, the recovery speed of the well-known ammonites is surprisingly fast. After this, larger predators appeared again in the ocean.
The mass extinction event in the end of the Permian almost left the ecosystem blank, which gave other organisms the opportunity to replace it. Before the mass extinction, the top of the marine food chain was primitive sharks. Although some of them have survived and gradually recovered, they have competitors, and a new overlord has appeared in the sea: Yulong. Benton said: "This shows that the restoration of the niche is not only the recovery of the original survivors, but also the prosperity of the latecomers. Before this mass extinction event, there were basically no reptiles in the ocean, but this catastrophic event The opportunity for them to occupy a place in the sea. "
Prior to this, paleontologists have also found many fossil sites that reflect the recovery after the mass extinction, but the discovery of the Luoping County fossil group in Yunnan is unique. Because it covers a complete ecosystem, there are plankton at the bottom of the food chain and predators at the top of the food chain.
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