<h1>Step into the mysterious Guangxi Fossil Kingdom</h1>
Original: Ma Lin WeChat public number: Reading is righteous
Let the mood go to travel -
I knew you were coming, so I waited, waited for you to discover, waited for your eyes to touch my body for billions of years.
——Carved by the monument on the shore of Penglai Beach in Laibin City
The beautiful Guangxi has attracted the attention of the people of the world with its unique landscape scenery and rich ethnic customs. In this magical land, brilliant Neolithic and Bronze Age civilizations have been born, and magnificent chapters of history have been written. Nowadays, the vicissitudes of the sea and the mulberry fields, the mountains and townships of Guangxi have undergone great changes. However, the rich historical relics still tell the story of life tens of thousands of years ago, tens of millions of years ago or even hundreds of millions of years ago, telling people what kind of animals and animals walked in the mountains, what kind of birds flew over the sky, and what kind of flowers bloomed all over the hillsides.
Scientific archaeology has confirmed that Guangxi was a vast ocean in the Proterozoic, but after many uplifts and sinks, most of which was still covered by seawater until the Triassic Period. At the end of the Triassic Period, the famous Indochinese Movement occurred, and the whole territory of Guangxi rose to land, and was never submerged by seawater again. In the more than one billion years of ups and downs and ups and downs of land and sea changes, Guangxi has formed a variety of marine sedimentary strata, leaving a wealth of paleontological fossil resources, which are hidden in the beautiful scenery of Guangxi, which is another beautiful world, waiting for people to explore and excavate.
Zeng Guangchun is a local university art teacher in Guangxi, but the search for fossils is his constant personal hobby, under his leadership, Zhong Ruiwen, Liu Qi, two paleontological archaeologists with him traveled to the important production areas of typical fossil phyla in Guangxi from the Cambrian to the Quaternary, wrote this "Hidden Landscape - Guangxi Paleontological Fossils", with a personalized version of the "Brief History of Life" for the 60th anniversary of the establishment of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region to present a generous gift.
The authors of this book, Liu Qi and Zhong Ruiwen, are at the site of the paleontological archaeological excavation
Now, let's follow in their footsteps, enjoy these hidden landscapes, and discover the secrets of Guangxi's fossil kingdom!
Jingxi
Guole Township, Jingxi City, with the beautiful scenery of Guilin's landscape, in those cascading mountains, has a "special buried fossil library" confirmed by archaeologists, belonging to the late Cambrian "Furong" of about 497 million to 485 million years ago, which is currently the richest and most exquisitely preserved Cambrian biome known in Guangxi. Look for trilobites, this is a must not go. After arduous search and excavation, Zeng Guangchun and the three of them presented us with the true face of the trilobite. look at! The first piece is called "Chinese Sok Worm", which digs out its head cover, and the dense nodules and the front edge of the triangle on it are the prominent features of "Chinese Sok Worm"; the second piece is called "Guangxi Hou Artemisia Mountain Worm", which digs out a small part of its thoracic segment and tail carapace. There are also many trilobites of different forms that have emerged in their excavations. In addition, they also excavated many echinoderms and brachiopods in Gole.
The author holds the fossil of the newly discovered "Sok worm"
Trilobite "Guangxi Housongli Mountain Worm"
Guilin
The penstone is a strange creature that first appeared in the middle Cambrian period, shaped like the traces of a pencil on the rock level. In the deep troughs formed by the movement of the earth's crust in the directions of Guilin-Damingshan-Sichengling and Wuzhou-Qinzhou in Guangxi, a large number of pencil fossils are preserved in the continuously deposited rock formations. The Ordovician strata in Guangxi are the most abundant, and the ordovician strata near Shengping Village in Huajiang Yao Township, northern Guilin, are more typical. The three archaeologists have gained a lot of money here, and they have even found random knocks in the rubble piled up on the side of the road. The penstones they found are quite representative, including "equalized penstone", "four-stroke stone", "pair of penstone", "top penstone", "leaf penstone" and "false triangular penstone".
Penstone fossils in the Ordovician strata of Shengping Village, Huajiang Township, Xing'an County, Guilin
On Mopan Mountain in The ancient town of Daxu in Guilin, the three archaeologists also found many fossils of sea lilies from the Carboniferous period, as well as fossils of sea urchins, starfish and some echinoderms of unknown species, which were preserved together with corals, brachipods, mosses and bivalves, together constituting a splendid ancient underwater garden world.
Extremely complete and rare starfish fossils found in the early Carboniferous Golden Formation formation of Mopanshan in Guilin
Fossil sea urchins found in Guilin
Nanning
In many places in Guangxi, Devonian fish fossils have been found, and a large number of "Lotus Mountain Formation", "Nagaoling Formation" and "Yujiang Formation" strata formed in the early Devonian inshore and shallow sea environments are distributed along the Xijiang River, which are extremely rich in fish fossils. Three archaeologists focused on the three sites, and in less than a year they were full of harvest. Here they not only found "multi-gills" similar to the early Devonian "Giant Oriental Fish" in Longmen Mountain, Sichuan, but also found many species similar to the "Three Forks Fish" in the early Devonian period of Qujing, Yunnan, and found relatively rare fossils of "true armor fish". In addition, they also found many brachiopods called "stone swallows" in the stones piled up and unloaded at some construction sites in Nanning.
Incomplete cephalocara of a Fish species in South China found in Xianhu, Nanning. It is a fish fossil that lived in the early Devonian period 400 million years ago
Guangxi quiver stone swallow is facing and looking sideways
To their surprise, when they braved the cold wind and rain to go to the 100,000 Mountains to find no dinosaur granary- plant fossils, they accidentally found a large number of jurassic "cone fern" fossils in the red sandstone of Nachen Town, Liangqing District, Nanning City. It is really "nowhere to step on the iron shoes, and it takes no effort to get there.". The hardships and frustrations of archaeological excavations and the windfalls are all written in this sentence.
A jurassic plant fossil found in the town of Nachen in Nanning
Nandan
In Nandan, northwestern Guangxi, hundreds of millions of years ago, the surface of the vast ocean floated with the oldest ammonite community, and under the deep seabed is another community of trilobites. These two communities were once separated by the deep sea, but after becoming fossils, they were buried together, leaving their figures in the rocks formed by the vicissitudes of the sea. Their wonderful encounter made it easy for the three archaeologists to pocket them all. They are found in large numbers on the hillsides along the road between Tangding and Nabiao villages in Luofu Township.
Nandan trilobites "side-eye worm"
Oblique ribs pine curl ammonite, a very famous ammonite species on the South Dan Lofu profile
guest
In Penglai Beach, east of Laibin City, a large area of continuous and complete strata accurately records the biological succession between the Permian and Triassic periods and the largest biological extinction event in earth's history. The creatures that suffered the catastrophe, especially the largest number of ammonites, all perished, and they gathered in layers and piled up like mass graves, seemingly freezing the moment of disaster and appearing tragically to archaeologists.
Ribeng Lai Beach Ammonite
Fu Sui
The Napai Basin in Fusui County is famous for the discovery of Konglong from the Cretaceous period in the 1990s. Three archaeologists still come here in the hope of discovering other creatures that accompanied the dinosaurs. As expected, they did find that the most common are bivalve organisms, especially "triangular mussels", which only appear in the Cretaceous lacustrological strata, which is the best evidence of the determination of the age of the dinosaur-containing strata in the basin, and also hints that the final resting place of those prehistoric giant beasts Kong Long may be the former lakeside shoals.
A model of the Great Stone Nanning Dragon Skeleton exhibited by the Guangxi Museum
Freshwater bivalve fossils are typical of the Early Cretaceous strata of the Napai Basin
The three archaeologists also went to Longlin, Tiandong, Baise, Ningming... See the hidden landscapes infinitely.
Tian Dong is a fossil of ammonite in the argillaceous limestone of Dengmotianling
From spring to winter, from south to north, from west to east. The footprints of Zeng Guangchun and others have spread throughout Guangxi. They have experienced severe cold and heat, harvested countless hopes and disappointments, and brought us to think about paleontological fossils. As liu qi, the author of this book, said: "The forces of nature are still constantly changing our world, including us humans, and we are still evolving." These forces have not ceased in the past, continue to function now, and will continue to exist in the future. Although the world is different after a thousand, ten thousand or even a hundred million years, the pace of human exploration will not stop because of this, just like the publication of a book is not the end, but a new beginning, which is worth looking forward to and fantasizing. ”
"Hidden Landscapes - Fossils of Guangxi Paleontology" was published
Hidden Landscapes: Fossils of Paleontology in Guangxi