The Chengjiang biota
Chinese shale preserves soft tissue — guts, gills, nerves — from a whole Cambrian seafloor.
- When
- Known to
- ± 2 million years
- Era
- Cambrian, Paleozoic
The Chengjiang deposits of Yunnan, roughly 518 million years old, contain hundreds of species with soft anatomy intact: digestive tracts, appendages, even neural tissue. Predating the Burgess Shale by around ten million years, it is the richest early Cambrian window we have, and the source of the earliest known vertebrates. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site.