China's Fossil Treasure Trove Just Got Richer

A rich fossil bed in China that has famously yielded a number of the earliest types of animals has been found to harbor an assortment of equally rich, but older, fossils that share a common link.

Paleontologists working at the site over the years have found an array of Cretaceous-era creatures, but now scientists are reporting that an even older array of fossils, a trove of Middle Jurassic-era animals that are 30 million years older than the Cretaceous fossil finds, is present across several sites in the region of northeastern China, and that the sites are linked together by shares species.

The new fossil assemblage has been dubbed the Daohugou Biota, named after a village near one of the major localities in Inner Mongolia.

"The Daohugou Biota gives us a look at a rarely glimpsed side of the Middle to Late Jurassic - not a parade of galumphing giants, but an assemblage of quirky little creatures like feathered dinosaurs, pterosaurs with 'advanced' heads on 'primitive' bodies, and the Mesozoic equivalent of a flying squirrel," said Corwin Sullivan, lead author of the research, which is published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Some of the fossils recovered from the Daohugou Biota include a mammal with a beaver-like tail that may have been used for swimming, the oldest dinosaurs preserved with feathers, and the oldest known gliding mammal.

Additionally, the site features a collection of small vertebrates with exquisitely preserved soft tissues such as feathers, fur, skin and external gills.

"Daohugou is proving to be one of the key sites for understanding the evolution of feathered dinosaurs, early mammals, and flying reptiles, due largely to the fantastic levels of preservation," said Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher at the Natural History Museum, London who was not involved in the research.

"Many of the fossils are stunning and offer vast amounts of information. There are only a handful of similar sites elsewhere in the world and this article represents the first comprehensive attempt to draw all of the relevant information together into a single benchmark paper," he said.