Maotianshan Hill, Hat Sky Mountain, in Chengjiang County, Yunnan, gave its name to shales that preserve the soft bodies of Early Cambrian animals in rare and exquisite detail, like the Burgess Shale of Canada but about ten million years older. They hold every animal group found in the Burgess Shale, which supports the idea that animal life diversified earlier or faster than the Burgess Shale alone suggests, and they are called the best window on the Cambrian explosion, above all on the origin of the chordates, the group that includes all vertebrates. The site’s quality was first recognised in 1984 with the discovery of Misszhouia, a soft-bodied relative of the trilobites, and it has produced a steady flow of new finds since, even a new phylum of early deuterostomes, the Vetulicolia. A 512-hectare Chengjiang Fossil Site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012.
Soft-bodied Cambrian animals and early chordates · Early Cambrian
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
China
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This is remote ground. The closest other places on the map are a long way off.
