Guiyang biota
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| Guiyang biota | |
|---|---|
| Stratigraphic range: late Induan, | |
| Type | Geological formation |
| Thickness | ~10 meters |
| Lithology | |
| Primary | Shale, limestone |
| Location | |
| Region | Guiyang, south China |
| Country | China |
  Guiyang biota (China) | |
The Guiyang biota is an exceptionally preserved Early Triassic (approximately 250.8 million years ago) fossil assemblage from the Daye Formation near Guiyang (China), discovered between 2015 and 2019[1] and first reported in 2023. It is the oldest known Mesozoic lagerstätte, and it provides evidence of the existence of a complex marine ecosystem shortly after the Permian–Triassic extinction event.[2]
The Guiyang biota comes from the northern margin of the Nanpanjang Basin,[2] that was a Triassic equatorial foreland basin[3] on the eastern side of the Tethys Ocean.
The presence of a rich biota in a near-Equatorial paleolatitude implies that, immediately after the Permian extinction event, global temperatures must have been tolerable for life even at the tropics - it was previously thought that the greenhouse climate would have reduced or eliminated biodiversity at low latitudes. The estimated sea surface temperature was about 35 °C.[2]
Age
The Guiyang biota belongs to the late Dienerian, a subsection of the Induan period of early Triassic.The biostratigraphy evidenced by the Radioceras ammonoids and the Neospathodus cristagalli and Neospathodus dieneri conodonts is consistent with the Dienerian, and uranium–lead zircon dating confirms the strata span about 110,000 years, between 250.83 and 250.72 millions of years ago, 1.08 millions of years after the Permian extinction.[2]
