Located at the junction of Chongqing, Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces (cities), Chongqing Chengkou County has rich animal and plant resources. Towards the south of the area, driving for almost 90 kilometers, you can reach Jiming Township. It was a steep slope, with a minimum altitude of 660 meters and a maximum altitude of 2,042 meters. The famous local religious tourist attraction, Jiming Temple, was built in it.
Jiming Temple surrounded by mountains
Recently, when we visited the county, we stumbled upon a secret that had long been hidden in the Jiming Temple. Today, we invite authoritative experts to unravel the mystery.
A "worm" drilled out of the stone stele in the temple
According to local records, Jiming Temple was founded in the Eastern Han Dynasty, and it is said that Liu Xiu, the Emperor of Han Guangwu, passed through the temple under construction, when the rooster crowed, hence the name.
Jiming Temple was founded during the Eastern Han Dynasty
On the afternoon of the 15th, the temple in front of us was as clean as ever, and whenever a visitor stepped into the temple, the monks in the temple took out a clean porcelain bowl and enthusiastically handed the well water.
The ancient well was located behind the courtyard, known as the White Crane Well, which still exists today, and the well water does not dry up continuously. According to local historical records, the tea leaves on the back hill of the temple were once offered as tributes to the Qianlong Emperor, and the tea was soaked with the water of the White Crane Well, and the fragrance was fragrant. To this end, the Qianlong Emperor once wrote a poem with a stroke of his pen, "Water in the White Crane Well, Tea in the Chicken Courtyard" to describe it.
The White Crane Well of Jiming Temple has not withered up to this day
The temple courtyard is heavy, the layers of pavilions are connected in a winding way, the temple is divided into two sections, the front hall is the Tibetan scripture building, and the rear hall is the Guanyin Hall. In front of the main entrance of the front hall, a stone caught our attention, among which there was a suspected remains of ancient creatures, white, as if there were bone lines.
It was a great surprise to see us, and a monk mysteriously said: "There may be many relics such as the stone flower platforms, stone pillars, and stone walls in the temple, but people can't see them with the naked eye." ”
Another monk, who brought us into the temple where the Buddha statue was enshrined, also mysteriously pointed to a stone tablet for us to experience on our own. Sure enough, as seen earlier at the front entrance of the front hall, the surface of the stele also shows the remains of suspected ancient creatures. Unlike before, it is more clearly shaped, resembling an insect, and its appearance is not white but brown.
Unknown fossils on temple stele
In recent years, many tourists who come to the temple to visit and worship the Buddha have also discovered this secret. Everyone's reaction was almost unanimous, saying how a 'worm' had been drilled out of the stone tablet. A monk scratched his head and said that as to whether this was an insect fossil or not, the monks were puzzled.
Like a feather, or a plant?
Up close, this insect-like fossil-like object seems to have a stalk like a plant stem, and the ends of the stalk seem to have tentacles; from a distance, like a feather, these tentacles are like fern leaves.
There are also unknown fossils on the ground stones
Could it be a plant fossil? In this regard, the relevant personnel of the forestry department of Chengkou County believe that the objects on the stone tablets are indeed paleontological fossils, but according to their judgment, this fossil is still a kind of echinoderm that first appeared in the Early Cambrian Period - sea lilies.
According to reports, the sea lily is an ancient invertebrate. Hundreds of millions of years ago, it could be seen everywhere in the ocean. Because of its multiple brachiopods, its flower-shaped, feathery body, calcareous shell on its surface, and its resemblance to a plant, people named it Sea Lily. Relevant personnel in the county's forestry department speculated that the fossil of the sea lily on the stone stele may be a fragment of the sea lily.
We learned from relevant information that during the Paleozoic Carboniferous Period, the number of sea lilies was huge and varied, and they formed a large grassland-like coverage with mosses and brachiopods on the seabed, and then due to the "Permian and Triassic extinction events", 90% of marine species went extinct, and sea lilies also quickly withdrew from the historical stage. After the death of the sea lily, these calcareous stems and calyxes are easily preserved as fossils, due to the disturbance of the seawater, these stems and calyxes are always scattered and preserved, losing the beautiful posture of the lily. Due to the wide variety of sea lilies that survived in ancient times, archaeology later found that there were more than 5,000 kinds of sea lily fossils, and even some limestone formations were composed of sea lily fossils.
"In some villages and towns, the pavement and steps are paved with rocks made of local materials, and over time, the surface of these stones is very smooth, and if you look closely, you will find some beautiful patterns." The relevant personnel of the county's forestry department told us that if the surface of the stone shows a flower-like, feather-like, five-pointed star-shaped, circle-like object, it is likely to be a sea lily fossil.
The chief expert solves two major puzzles
Mystery 1: It is a fossil of hornstone
Are they animal fossils or plant fossils? Why does the fossil appear in the Forest Temple of Chengkou County? With these questions in mind, we found Lin Bizhong, chief cultural relics expert in Chongqing and vice president of the Chongqing Municipal Society of Literature and History.
Based on the relevant historical and cultural records of Jiming Temple and the fossil form shown in the pictures, Lin Bizhong concluded that the fossil of the paleontology belongs to the fossil of horn stone.
"Hornstones, of the paleoinvertebrates, were the most widely distributed cephalopods in the ocean during the Ordovician period and were still widely distributed in the oceans until the Jurassic period. It has a hard shell and belongs to the cephalopods. This animal first appeared 440 million years ago. As the name suggests, the shape of the hornstone shell resembles the horns of an ox or a sheep, and is generally straight, bent or coiled. Lin Bizhong mentioned that after the death of the horn stone, the flesh is usually difficult to preserve, and only the hard shell can be preserved as a fossil.
Lin Bizhong, chief cultural relics expert in Chongqing, found a fossil of a horn stone in the River Cover of Xiushan County
Lin Bizhong also mentioned that the appearance of the horned stone shell is not necessarily smooth, and the surface of the shell has different ornaments, such as nodules, tumors, various horizontal stripes, vertical stripes, etc., and the structure of the next door and body tube in the body is also very different. China's horn fossil resources are very rich, ordos horn stone, Amen horn stone, gray horn stone in the northern Ordovician strata, aurora horn stone, pan horn stone, michlin horn stone in the southern Ordovician strata are representative genera.
Lin Bizhong analyzed that the fossils of the horn stones in the temple are conical in shape and have a clear spiral in the shell, and this type of fossil is very common and distributed in marine formations around the world, especially limestone. The extant Nautilus is one of the descendants of the horned stone animals.
Mystery 2: It was formed in the "Shu Lake" period
"The Sichuan Basin has experienced vicissitudes of the sea basin - lake basin - land basin." Lin Bizhong mentioned that the Sichuan Basin was part of the Yangtze Land Terrace during the Sea Basin period, called Sichuan Land Terrace, and experienced two large-scale sea immersion. The first time began in the Cambrian period more than 500 million years ago, and continued to last more than 370 million years in the Silurian Period, which continued to sink into an ocean basin, and the Caledonian Movement occurred during the Silurian Period, except for the Longmen Mountain Trough in the west, which continued to sink, and the rest of the area rose to land. At the end of the Carboniferous Period, 270 million years ago, a larger second flood occurred, and the basin was once again occupied by the ocean. During the Permian period, land and sea alternated to form coal mines such as Nantong, Songzao, and Tianfu near Chongqing. At the end of the Permian Period, magma erupted from the western part of the basin, and the basalt around the small golden dome of Mount Emei and the Qingyin Pavilion was formed at this time.
"In the Triassic Period, 190 million years ago, the 'Indochina Movement' gradually uplifted the edge of the basin into mountains, and the areas submerged by the sea gradually rose to land, from sea basins to lake basins. At that time, the lake almost occupied the entire territory of the present-day Sichuan Basin, called 'Shu Lake', which ended the history of sea immersion. Lin Bizhong said that the fossil horn stones that exist in the temple were formed at this stage. He also mentioned that during the mesozoic era for more than 100 million years, the climate of the Sichuan Basin was warm and humid, and ferns, cycads and gymnosperms grew everywhere, and reptiles and dinosaurs dominated for a time.
Lin Bizhong believes that the fossil remains of paleontology presented in the temple provide good scientific research value for the study of local geology, humanities, archaeology and other aspects of history. As it turned out, the mystery of the stone stele that had been hidden in the Jiming Temple for a long time was finally solved.
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