CCTV news: Recently, the early life research team composed of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and virginia tech in the United States found the oldest known footprint fossil on earth in the ancient strata of the Three Gorges area of Yichang, Hubei Province. This discovery provides an important clue to deciphering the origin of symmetrical animals with appendages on both sides, and the results have been published in the international academic journal Science Advances.
Symmetrical animals with appendages on both sides, such as arthropods and link animals, are the most abundant and diverse animal phyla. When they appear has been the focus of paleontologists. Scientists speculate that their ancestors may have appeared in the Ediacaran period about 500 to 600 million years ago, but no definitive fossil evidence has been found.
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Chen Zhe, a researcher at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that this was found by the scientific research team in the excavation process of Ediacara biological fossils in the strata of the Three Gorges area 550 to 540 million years ago, and the fossil they found had pits, that is, footprints, formed by the appendages of animals during walking.
The fossil footprint was found to consist of two rows of footprints, characterized by the fact that the tracer could support its body from the surface of the sediment through appendages, and that the remains were clearly formed by large, complex animals symmetrical on both sides, and that these animals had paired appendages. At the same time, these footprint fossils are connected to the submerged caves, reflecting the complexity of the behavior of the trace organisms. Tracers sometimes burrow under the algae mat layer for feeding and oxygen, and sometimes drill out of the algae mat layer to crawl on the surface of the sediment.
Chen Zhe said: "Our current discovery is not only the earliest footprint on the earth, but also shows that there were animals with appendages in the pre-Wu Period, which opened the prelude to the Cambrian explosion. ”