Chengjiang Fossil Site
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
The Chengjiang Fossil Site is a hilly 512-hectare area around Maotianshan in Chengjiang County, Yunnan Province, China. Its mudstones preserve an early Cambrian marine community in which soft tissues survive as well as hard parts, and UNESCO counts at least sixteen phyla and about 196 species. It records the rapid diversification of life when almost all of today's major animal groups emerged.
Its exceptional preservation was first recognised with the discovery in 1984 of Misszhouia, a soft-bodied relative of trilobites. The palaeontologist Hou Xianguang's first discovery of animal fossils in these beds led to the establishment of the Chengjiang biota. Scientists from around the world have studied the site since, and it led to the naming of a new phylum of primitive deuterostomes, the Vetulicolia.
The Chengjiang biota contains all the animal groups found in Canada's Burgess Shale but is older, so it more strongly supports the view that animals diversified earlier or faster in the early Cambrian. Fish-like animals such as Myllokunmingia and Haikouichthys found here bear on the origin of chordates. The site was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2012.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).