In 2018, Zhao Ridong led the team to harvest a full harvest when digging in the wild in the Xishan Village Group of Qujing Miandian Reservoir (provided by Gai Zhikun).
Recently, Meng Xinyuan, a master's student at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published the latest research results on the new materials for jawless armorfish roaming fish 420 million years ago in a cover article in the professional academic journal "Journal of Paleontology". This is the largest true armor fish roaming fish after 30 years, and the "Ancient Fish Kingdom" in Qujing, Yunnan Province. Behind this important discovery is a scientific research story that spans 30 years and is completed by four generations of teachers and students.
Yuanshan Ancient Fish Country, 400 million years old, Yunnan Qujing is known as the "Lost Ancient Fish Kingdom". In the 110 years from 1911 to the present, paleontologists have traveled to the mountains and rivers of Qujing and discovered many kinds of paleontological fossils, especially ancient fish fossils, which have unveiled many evolutionary mysteries. Behind the reputation of the "Ancient Fish Kingdom", the painstaking efforts of generations of scientists such as Ding Wenjiang, Zhang Miman, Zhu Min and so on are condensed, and in the "relay" of scientists to study and protect qujing ancient fish fossils, the "Ancient Fish Kingdom" is going to the world. As early as 100 years ago, Ding Wenjiang, a pioneer in China's geological undertakings, found ancient fish fossils in Qujing, the earliest fish fossils discovered by Chinese scholars. In the early 1980s, the vertebrate paleozoologist Zhang Miman discovered meat fin fish such as Yang's fish and strange fish in Qujing, which provided key fossil evidence for the evolution of vertebrates from water to land, and shined internationally. In 1987, Zhu Min, then a doctoral student of Academician Zhang Miman and a famous paleoichthyologist in China, accidentally found a very complete fossil armor fish head near the city wall of The Southern City Gate in Qujing when collecting dissertation materials in eastern Yunnan, and gave it a very romantic name in the Journal of Paleovertebrates in 1992 - roaming fish. The genus name Isomato is mainly taken from its head beetle is large and stupid, and the word "roaming" is taken from the meaning of roaming in the water foraging. The wandering orthodontic specimen is a relatively complete cephalocarp, revealing the key morphological features on the back of the wandering skull, but unfortunately there is only one specimen and does not preserve the morphological features of the ventral surface of the cephalothorax. In 2002, I became a student of Zhu Min's researcher to relay the research of armor fish in China. "For 30 years, we have been trying to find new fossils of roaming fish, but the fossils were found near the south gate of the ancient city of Qujing. Today's South City Gate has become a cultural attraction in Qujing City, and it is no longer possible to carry out field excavations. In 2018, master's student Meng Xinyuan became a student of the author again, and the title of her master's thesis was "Morphology and Systematics of Early Devonian True Armor Fish in Qujing, Yunnan Province.". Therefore, we carefully sorted out the specimens of other armorfish that were not described collected by Researcher Zhu Min when collecting dissertation data that year, and the result was a surprise, we actually found a "fish that slipped through the net" that roamed the net!
In 2018, when the research team carried out a field survey near the Qujing Miandian Reservoir, it collected another key fossil of the wandering fish in the dark gray siltstone of the Xishan Village Formation, which is completely a new location and new layer, which is mainly due to the construction of the Chemabi Reservoir Diversion Tunnel Project, a major national water conservancy project, in Qujing, a plateau water transmission tunnel through the mountains and mountains to divert the water from the Chemabi Reservoir to Qujing, and the tunnel outlet is on the small hillside below the dam of the Miandian Reservoir in QujingJingKai District. Therefore, a large amount of dark gray siltstone from the Xishan Formation excavated by the excavation tunnel was piled up here, and after the continuous and unremitting efforts of the research team, the third relatively complete head of the roaming fish was finally found. Gai Zhikun
【Source: Qujing Daily】
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