A 6 million-year-old fossil of a striped rabbit was found in Zhaotong, Yunnan

The picture shows the striped rabbit restoration.

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Kunming, July 9 (Xu Yuanfeng, Yang Ming) Recently, scholars from Harvard University, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, and other research institutions jointly discovered a 6 million-year-old Sumatran rabbit fossil in the Shuitangba community of the Taiping Subdistrict Office in Zhaoyang District, Zhaotong City, Yunnan Province, providing new clues for their search for the earliest ancestors. The strange-looking rabbit fossils found this time have been found to have lived in humid swampy environments 6 million years ago, officially known as the long-folded winged rabbit or the Sumatran rabbit. The restored long-folded winged rabbit has a pair of short ears and several dark stripes on the body, commonly known as the striped rabbit. Studies have shown that the striped rabbit of Shuitangba is the same species as the long-folded winged rabbit found in Lufeng County, Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, and the morphology of the premolars suggests that this species is an early representative of the striped rabbit (i.e., Sumatran rabbit) living in humid areas today. Fossils of the Late Miocene striped rabbit in Yunnan record evidence of the species's survival in the Yunnan region, a study that reconstructs the approximate historical process of the evolution of the Sumatran rabbit.

After the striped rabbit appeared in the ancient ape sites of Zhaotong, Lufeng and other places in Yunnan, it spread throughout Southeast Asia and eventually reached the present-day Sumatra region. Successive major discoveries and biological evolutionary research results show that Zhaotong is the place where major biological evolutionary events occurred in the period of the origin of the late Miocene human upright walking, and a large number of new biological genera and species were discovered here, and more new results will be released in the future.