On July 22-25, 2021, Daydream Travel launched the "Journey to Explore China's Three Paleobita - Rehe Biota", the first stop being the Liaoning Chaoyang Bird Fossil National Geopark. The whole group of nearly 20 people, accompanied by paleontologist Professor Sun Keqin and naturalist the strongest brain "water brother", thus kicking off the prelude to the rehe biota science popularization tour.
Visit the classic section of the fossil origin of Western Liaoning
The whole team of this activity took the paleontological science popularization trip as the main line, combined the visit to the museum fossil specimens, the outdoor camp fossil collection, the classic geological profile investigation of the Rehe biota in Liaoning Province, the indoor fossil specimen restoration and the paleontological science lecture, and had a preliminary understanding of the knowledge of paleontology, the formation of the earth, the five large-scale extinctions in the geological and historical periods, the evolution and extinction of dinosaurs, the origin of birds and the Rehe biota, which stimulated everyone's interest in learning earth science knowledge. Through our field investigation in western Liaoning, we believe that the current Rehe biota should be represented by the original Chinese dragon bird (Sinosauropteryx prima), the sage Confucius (Confuciusornis sanctus) and the Archaefructus liaoningensis.
Visit the museum
discuss
Collect fossils
The child collected fossils of wolffin fish
The "Rehe Biota", which has been called "the most amazing paleontological discovery of the 20th century" by the national media, "feathered dinosaur", "the first flower", "four-winged dinosaur", "the world's first pterosaur embryo", etc., are all produced from the "Rehe Biota", and these fossils have caused a sensation in the world. The main fossil production area of the Rehe biota, Liaoxi, China, is known as the "treasure house of world-class fossils" because of its exquisite fossil preservation and extremely complete fossil variety. The Rehe biota, also because of the various types of fossils for many paleontological theory research, such as birds originated from dinosaurs, provide key evidence, for the traditional view of biological evolution has an unprecedented impact, so the study of the Rehe biota has become one of the hot spots and frontiers in the paleontological community today.
Field trips
The epoch attribution of the Rehe biota has long been a different view, and most scholars currently believe that if considered in terms of vertebrate combinations, its age should also be early Cretaceous, and some researchers have also done some isotopic age, that is, some minerals in volcanic ash to do isotope age determination. Its age is actually 125 million years.
Indoor paleontology science lectures
Learn fossil restoration techniques
The Rehe biota is an ancient biota of East Asia. With Liaoning Yixian County, Beipiao, Lingyuan and other areas as the main production areas in China. In 1928, Professor Gripp published a scientific masterpiece, The Geological History of China. In this book, he first proposed the term "Rehe biota" to represent a comprehensive fossil group distributed in the East Asian wolffin fish rock system. The name "Rehe" comes from the classic source of fossil groups, the eastern part of the then Rehe Province. From the 1930s to the 1940s onwards, the name Rehe biota was widely used in various geological literature. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Rehe Province was abolished, and its western part was assigned to Hebei Province and the eastern part to Liaoning Province. The classical origin of the original Rehe biota thus fell to the western part of today's Liaoning Province, that is, the western Liaoning region. However, the name Rehe Biota, which has a profound influence in the geological paleontological community, remains. In 1962, Mr. Gu Zhiwei, a famous geological paleontologist in China, in his classic treatise "Jurassic and Cretaceous in China", summarized the "Rehe Biota" or "Rehe Fossil Group" represented by the Oriental Leaf Limb Introduction, the Three-tailed Ephemera and the Wolffin Fish.
Dinosaurs thematic area
Explain the Chinese dragon bird
In these sedimentary strata of western Liaoning, there are rich biological fossils, with a total of more than 20 phyla, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, insects, gastropods, bivalves, leaf limbs, mesomorphs and other animal fossils, as well as ferns, gymnosperms and early angiosperms fossils. Since the late 1980s, a large number of rare fossils have been found in the area, such as primitive birds, feathered dinosaur and mammal fossils, and fossils of the early angiosperm paleogosteens.
Museum fossil exhibits
The fossils of the Rehe biota found in Western Liaoning include almost all biological categories in the transition from the Mesozoic to the Cenozoic, and provide an extremely valuable fossil basis for studying major theoretical issues such as the origin of the Rehe biota, the origin of birds, the origin of euthanasia, the origin of angiosperms, and the co-evolution of insects and flowering plants. As a result, the Rehe biota has been hailed as "one of the world's most important paleontological discoveries of the 20th century", a world-class fossil treasure trove, Pompeii in the Mesozoic Era. The discovery and research of the Rehe biota has solved many paleontological puzzles. The paleontological fossils found in Western Liaoning include almost all the biological categories that transitioned from the Mesozoic to the Cenozoic, which greatly enriches the combined appearance of the Rehe biota, and is of great value for studying the origin of the Rehe biota, the relationship between the "feathered dinosaurs" and the origin of birds and the origin of feathers, for exploring the evolution of early birds, and for examining the radiation of mammals and angiosperms.
Visit the fossil excavation site
Western Liaoning fossils refer to paleontological fossils produced in the western Liaoning region of China, which is the birthplace of the world-famous Late Mesozoic Rehe biota. The variety, abundance, preservation and scientific research value of the Rehe biota are among the highest in the world, and no other part of the world can match.
In the past 30 years, more than 30 kinds of dinosaur fossils have been found in the Rehe biota of Liaoning Province, including Chinese dragon bird, Tianyu dragon, feather king dragon, Qi pterosaur, Dilong, Shenzhou dragon, Beipiplex, tail feather dragon, small robber dragon, Chinese bird dragon (Sinornithosaurus), slender tarptorosaurus, Chinese hunting dragon, "Sleepy dragon", Dou nose dragon, primitive ancestral bird, Yixian dragon, Liaoning giant dragon, Northeast dragon, Liaoning dragon, Keshi dragon, Rehe dragon, Jinzhou dragon, parrot-billed dragon, Liaojiao dragon, long-sleeping dragon, etc.
Take a group photo with the Chinese Dragon Bird
The world's first feathered dinosaur, Sinosauropteryx prima, reported in 1996, lived in the Early Cretaceous 140 million years ago and was discovered in 1996 in the Cherehe biota of northwest Liaoning. At first, it was thought to be a primitive bird, so it was named the Chinese Dragon Bird, which was later confirmed by scientists to be a small carnivorous dinosaur. It belongs to the genus Oftosaurus in the family Mycephalus. The skeleton is about 1 meter long, the forelimbs are thick and short, the claw hooks are sharp, the hind legs are long, suitable for running, and the whole body is covered with primitive feathers. The Chinese dragon bird is the first long-feathered dinosaur found in the world. It literally means "dinosaur-like bird from China". This is because when it was first discovered, it was considered the most primitive bird of all time. It is now recognized as belonging to the theropod family Megalodonidae. Morphologically, the primitive Chinese dragon bird is at a relatively primitive evolutionary level of evolution to birds. The Chinese dragon bird has a filamentous skin derivative on its back from head to tail, and is the world's first dinosaur fossil to preserve a similar structure, which provides important information for the origin of bird feathers, and the Chinese dragon bird is also famous all over the world.
Chinese Dragon Bird
The 1999 report of the Early Cretaceous strata of Sihetun Village in Beipiao, western Liaoning Province, is named after the Latin words "Sino" (meaning "China"), "rnitho" (meaning "like a bird") and "saurus" (meaning "lizard"), meaning "lizard like a bird from China". There are currently two species in the genus Chinese ornithischia: the model species, The Chinese Ornitosaurus millenii, and the species name "millenii" represents the upcoming millennium.
Microraptor gui, the world's earliest four-winged dinosaur. In January 2003, the cover article of the journal Nature published the four-winged dinosaur discovered by the paleovertebrates of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which could glide in the air, providing the most direct fossil evidence for the "arboreal origin hypothesis" of birds, that is, the ancestors of birds inhabited trees, and with the help of feathers, they could "glide" down from trees and gradually evolve the ability to actively fly.
By the Late Cretaceous, the global climate became dry and cold, the four seasons were distinct, the dinosaurs began to decline, the number of genera and fossils was greatly reduced, and the individuals were far less than the Jurassic, on the contrary, the fossilized dinosaur eggs increased greatly, which was the result of low hatching rate. The late Cretaceous dinosaurs, 650 billion years ago, went extinct. There are different explanations for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Many people believe that the extinction of dinosaurs is related to catastrophic events of extraterrestrial causes, such as supernova explosions and small bodies hitting the earth.
camp
From ancient times to the present, humans know less about the phylogenetic relationships of birds than any other vertebrate, and after the first archaeopteryx fossil was reported in 1861, the origin of birds became the most interesting topic for biologists and paleontologists. The earliest fossil representation of birds is archaeopteryx (Archaeopteryx) of the Late Jurassic period in Germany, which is the intermediate type of transition from reptile to bird, and is the earliest representative of birds. In addition, in 1986, a new bird fossil was found in Texas, USA, named Protoavis, which means "primitive bird". Its age is the late Triassic period, which predates Archaeopteryx but is closer to modern birds than Archaeopteryx. Therefore, it has been suggested that Archaeopteryx may have been a side branch in the phylogenetic evolution of birds. The origin and early development of birds needs to be studied in depth.
Beginning in the 1990s, the study of the Rehe biota entered a peak marked by the discovery of early bird fossils. The Cathayornis yandica and the Sinornis santensis represent the earliest discoveries of bird fossils in the Rehe biota; the subsequent discovery of the Confuciusornis sanctus had a sensational international impact. The sage Confucius is a suborder of lizard birds, one of the earliest and most primitive birds in the world; in addition, there are Catbayornis yandica, Catbayornis caudatus, petite Liaoxiornis delicatus, Xinghaiornis lini, and kompsornis Longicaudus) and other important fossils have been reported.
Cretaceous Park
The birds of the Rehe biota are a very special taxon of Mesozoic birds, because they also have mosaic features such as a long tail like a small theropod dinosaur and a forelimb as developed as a bird, which represents the excessive type of dinosaurs in the evolution of birds, which is of great significance for the study of the origin and evolution of birds.
Fossil paleontology in the museum
Around the same time, a series of important fossils of other phyla have been discovered, including the early mammal Zhangheotherium quinquecuspidens (Zhangheotherium quinquecuspidens), which was first reported in 1995 and officially named in 1997, and the world's first feathered dinosaur reported in 1996, the original Chinese dragon bird (Sinosauropteryx prima). The Report of the Gu's LiaoningOpterus Gui in 2003, the Archaefructus Liaoningensis reported in 1998, the Archaeofructus Sinensis reported in 2002, and the Archaeofructus eoflora reported in 2004 have shocked the world again and again. Hailed by the academic community as one of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century. Scientists predict that due to the major discovery of mesozoic paleontological fossils in western Liaoning, China, some difficult problems in biological evolution theory are expected to be solved in the near future.
At the museum
The rise of angiosperms has reshaped the major ecosystem patterns of the world's major continents, and the origin and early rapid evolution of angiosperms are the jewels in the crown of botany. The origin and early evolution of angiosperms has been a hot topic in botany, paleontology, and evolutionary biology. In the past 10 years, the origin of angiosperms estimated by molecular clocks has mostly pointed to the Jurassic or even Triassic, but the earliest fossils of the angiosperm crown recognized by paleontology were only found in the Early Cretaceous, a question that remains unresolved. Shi Gongle et al. (2021) studied a large number of well-preserved plant fossils from the Early Cretaceous period dating back 126 million years from Inner Mongolia, providing new evidence for the origin of angiosperms. Comparisons with other plant fossils show that these fossil plants, which are closely related to angiosperms, are diverse in reproductive structure. And further proved that angiosperms did not "suddenly appear".
Western Liaoning is a very special place, belonging to the inland and lake-rich area, and volcanic eruptions are more frequent. After the eruption, a large number of organisms were submerged in the lake, so that there was a lack of oxygen, making the corpses less prone to decay. In addition to the bones, some of the body's surface structures have been preserved. For example, feathered dinosaur fossils are a major feature of Western Liaoning. The fossil burials in western Liaoning are all involved in volcanic ash, which is very delicate and can better preserve the details of the organism. More than 100 million years ago, in western Liaoning, volcanoes never stopped, and a large number of creatures died instantly again and again, and were quickly buried by volcanic ash. More than 100 million years later, those creatures, with their pre-mortal state, became the most classic paleontological fossils in different rock formations, telling us the story of the gradual changes and mutations that have occurred in the history of the earth.
Note: This article is part of the popular science lecture of "Exploring China's Three Paleobita - Rehe Biota", does not represent academic achievements, the content is based on a number of views and research results, only thank you!
All photos in this article were taken by Daydream Travel, thanks!