China on EARTH Magazine

Earliest bird-like lungs found in China

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 14:10:35 -0500

Modern birds have complex respiratory systems, which are needed to meet the high energetic demands of flight, often at high altitudes. A 120-million-year-old specimen of the ornithuromorph Archaeorhynchus spathula shows that it already had lung structures like those of modern birds. Credit: public domain.

Before birds took to the air, a number of anatomical features evolved that allowed them to get off the ground. While many of these features were skeletal adaptations that have been well-documented in the fossil record, when exactly the large-volume lungs needed to power flight developed has long been a mystery. But the recent discovery of a unique fossil bearing a significant amount of preserved soft tissue, including lung tissue, has shed light on how early birds adapted to breathe in flight.

Two new species fill gap in dinosaur family tree

Thu, 08 Nov 2018 12:53:32 -0500

An artist's reconstruction of important alvarezsaurian genera from left to right: Haplocheirus, Xiyunykus, Bannykus and Shuvuuia. Credit: Viktor Radermacher.

Cretaceous rocks in northwestern China have yielded two new dinosaur species that help fill a 70-million-year gap in dinosaur phylogeny. The new species — Xiyunykus pengi and Bannykus wulatensis — are both alvarezsaurians, an odd group of dinosaurs that, by the Late Cretaceous, had evolved many avian characteristics such as birdlike skulls, tiny teeth and light, slender bodies, as well as unique mole-like single-clawed forearms that were likely useful for digging.

Extinct gibbon found in Chinese tomb

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 12:52:31 -0400

Junzi imperialis is a newly described extinct gibbon from China. Credit: Samuel Turvey/ZSL.

About 2,200 years ago, a Chinese noblewoman was buried in a tomb with a menagerie of animals, including 12 horses, a leopard, a lynx and a species of gibbon unknown to modern science. The new ape, identified using detailed cranial and dental measurements as a new genus and species — Junzi imperialis — may represent the first ape to have gone extinct due to human influence after the last ice age.

Earth's first footprints

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 09:37:23 -0400

These fossil trackways from China bear Earth's first "footprints" — the dimple-like bumps that make up each trackway. Credit: NIGP.

As far as we know, life originated on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago, and for roughly the first 3 billion years of that history all life was microscopic. Then, during the Ediacaran Period from 635 million to 541 million years ago, the first organisms visible to the naked eye emerged. Although many members of this group, called the Ediacara biota, would have looked alien to us, some nonetheless had features we might find familiar. And according to a new study, it was Ediacaran creatures that left behind Earth’s oldest-known footprints.

Pairing geoheritage and economic development: China's Guizhou Province offers a modern model

Thu, 22 Mar 2018 14:00:53 -0400

Guizhou Province is known for its stunning karst topography. Credit: ©iStockphoto.com/KingWu.

As I admired an immaculately preserved colony of 230-million-year-old crinoids lying next to an equally impressive skeleton of a sharp-toothed ichthyosaur at China’s Guanling Fossil Group National Geopark, I thought back to family trips to North American national parks during my youth. The natural wonders I saw on those trips strongly influenced my career choice and shaped my perception of how humans fit into Earth’s long history. Today, even after more than 35 years spent studying the Earth, every visit to a spectacular natural site like this one in Guanling still engenders the same excitement and insight I had as a youngster.

Acid rain triggered deadly Chinese landslide

Tue, 20 Mar 2018 15:11:42 -0400

The Jiweishan landslide began high on these cliffs at the interface between limestone and shale layers, sending tons of rubble into the valley. Credit: Mauri McSaveney.

On June 5, 2009, a catastrophic landslide killed 74 people in southwestern China. But a lack of recent earthquake activity or heavy rainfall left geologists questioning what had triggered the slide. A new study suggests that China’s acid rain may have played a role in weakening the limestone and shale slope in unexpected ways.

Asymmetrical fossil feathers fill in timeline of flight

Tue, 15 Aug 2017 14:19:18 -0400

To get off the ground and evolve into flying birds, dinosaurs got a lift from asymmetrical feathers, which are more aerodynamic than symmetrical feathers. The discovery of a new species of asymmetrically feathered dinosaur in northeastern China from the Early Cretaceous is helping fill in the timeline of adaptations that led to flight.

Baby Louie dinosaur fossil gets a formal name

Thu, 10 Aug 2017 11:33:59 -0400

Top: An illustration of a Beibeilong embryo and egg fossil, with reconstructions of the skeleton and embryo to the right. Bottom: An artist's rendition of the nesting parents. Credit: both: Zhao Chuang.

A baby dinosaur found fossilized with a clutch of eggs in China in the 1990s has finally been identified as an embryo from a new species of giant oviraptorosaur, according to a study in Nature Communications. The specimen, nicknamed “Baby Louie” and once featured on the cover of National Geographic, has been formally classified as a caenagnathid oviraptorosaur named Beibeilong sinensis, which translates to “Chinese baby dragon,” by Hanyong Pu of the Henan Geological Museum in Zhengzhou, China, and colleagues.

Dust influences pollution levels in eastern China

Thu, 10 Aug 2017 11:21:24 -0400

Smog blankets eastern China in this satellite image from October 2010. Credit: NASA.

Air pollution often enshrouds cities in eastern China in a thick haze that impairs visibility and causes respiratory health problems. Emissions from human activity are mainly to blame, but climate researchers now report that natural forces — namely, dust kicked into the air by wind — can also exert a strong control over how much pollution persists in the air.

Monsoon shifts shaped early Chinese cultures

Wed, 17 May 2017 10:19:48 -0400

The landscape near Lake Dali, with elevations of the lake surface during past highstands noted. Credit: Yonaton Goldsmith.

Rapid, climate-driven shifts in monsoon patterns may have shaped ancient Chinese societies, according to new research. And their history could be our future.

Geologic Column: My China syndrome

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 10:01:05 -0400

Satellite photo of the Sichuan Basin — in Sichuan Province, north-central China. The pollution from the urban and industrial centers of the Sichuan Basin in Sichuan is visible at the bottom of the image. Credit: NASA, public domain.

My obsession with China began when our son Jeffrey moved there 10 years ago. Since then, we have visited him a half dozen times, and the change that we have witnessed in the country in that time has been staggering.

Chinese air pollution clears up mystery of London's 1952 hazardous haze

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 10:56:59 -0500

Thick haze hangs over eastern China in October 2004. Credit: NASA SeaWIFS Project.

In December 1952, a fatal fog crept through London for almost five days, smothering the city in a yellow haze that reeked of rotten eggs. The “Great Smog,” as it was called, caused up to 12,000 deaths and left more than 150,000 people hospitalized in the worst air pollution event in European history. The calamity sparked the British Parliament to pass the Clean Air Act in 1956, but the exact chemical processes that caused the event have remained a mystery, until now.

Discovered: One of the last-surviving Asian dinosaurs

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 09:24:27 -0500

Paleontologists have discovered a new species of oviraptorosaur, a group of strange bird-like dinosaurs without teeth. The species, Tongtianlong limosus, has been described based on a specimen preserved in mudstone dating to the end of the Cretaceous. The find adds to a growing list of newly unearthed and similarly aged oviraptorosaur species, suggesting the group flourished during the last few million years of the Age of Dinosaurs before all nonavian dinosaurs were killed off in the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

How to hide a dinosaur

Tue, 27 Dec 2016 17:19:47 -0500

An artist's illustration of a camouflaged Psittacosaurus. Credit: Jakob Vinther, University of Bristol, and Bob Nicholls (Paleocreations.com).

Analysis of a finely preserved fossil dinosaur from China has revealed the animal’s erstwhile camouflage. It appears that the meter-high Early Cretaceous ceratopsid Psittacosaurus was light-colored on its underside and dark on top, a pattern known as countershading that may hint that the small herbivore lived in a dense forest environment.

A story in the sediment: Emperor Yu's "Great Flood" may have been real

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 15:47:36 -0500

Fourteen skeletons of victims killed by an earthquake in Qinghai Province, China, some 4,000 years ago. The earthquake may also have triggered a landslide that blocked the Yellow River, eventually leading to a catastrophic outburst flood. Credit: Cai Linhai.

Ancient Chinese texts re-count the story of a great flood on the Yellow River some 4,000 years ago and Emperor Yu’s heroic efforts to dredge and redirect floodwaters, thereby taming the prolonged and catastrophic floodwaters and setting the stage for the agricultural boom that followed. His success is said to have proved a divine mandate for establishing the Xia dynasty, the first in China’s history. But in the absence of geological evidence for such a flood, scholars have long disagreed as to the veracity of the story.

Hammerhead herbivore pioneered vegetarianism in Triassic seas

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 14:01:53 -0400

A model of the head of the hammerhead vegetarian Atopodentatus unicus beside a fossil of the Triassic marine reptile. Credit: ©Nick Fraser.

New fossils found in southern China hint that the earliest herbivorous marine reptiles got off to a bizarre start: Atopodentatus unicus, which lived about 244 million years ago and sported a unique hammerhead-like snout for grazing underwater plants, sheds light on how the earliest marine reptiles began experimenting with herbivory after the Permian mass extinction, which killed off 96 percent of marine organisms about 252 million years ago. This “Great Dying” event left vast holes in the ecology of the Early Triassic, and a diversity of new feeding styles evolved to occupy the open niches.

Down to Earth With: Hydrogeologist Shemin Ge

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 14:51:51 -0400

Shemin Ge is a hydrogeologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and GSA's 2016 Birdsall-Dreiss Lecturer. Credit: Connie Ge.

" graduated from high school in China, the country was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. During this movement, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, many colleges and universities were closed, and Ge, like most teenagers from urban areas, was sent to work in the countryside. She was assigned to a brick-making factory, where she had to haul heavy, machine-molded bricks outside so they would dry in the sun. Unless the forecast called for good weather, the teens also had to cover the bricks each evening to prevent them from cracking in the rain.

Researchers profile magma chamber beneath North Korean volcano

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 14:00:29 -0400

Lake Chon fills part of Mount Paektu's caldera on the border of China and North Korea. Credit: James Hammond.

An enigmatic volcano straddling the border between North Korea and China has been investigated for the first time by an international team of seismologists. In 2013, researchers installed seismometers near the volcano — called Mount Paektu in North Korea and Changbaishan in China — to determine what was going on beneath the surface. The team’s results, detailed in a new study published in Science Advances, reveal a potential source of magma that may have created one of the largest volcanic eruptions in the last few thousand years — and that could cause the volcano to erupt again.

China's Red Deer Cave people may have survived until the last ice age

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 17:41:16 -0400

Artist's reconstruction of a Red Deer Cave man. Credit: Peter Schouten.

In the 1980s, a collection of bones from very small hominids was excavated from a cave in southwestern China, alongside a number of bones from a species of large red deer. Nicknamed the “Red Deer Cave people,” but not yet declared a distinct species, researchers previously dated radiocarbon in the sediments where the bones were found to about 14,000 years ago. In a new comparative study, the same team has now found that the hominids from which the bones came appear to have been similar to — although far smaller than — Homo habilis and Homo erectus, suggesting it could indeed be a new species.

Chinese cave art reveals record of climate change

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 09:58:36 -0500

An inscription from 1891 found in Dayu Cave (entrance shown above). Credit: both: L. Tan.

In times of drought, Dayu Cave in the Qinling Mountains of central China has remained a reliable source of water, and since at least the 16th century, thirsty visitors to the cave recorded their pilgrimages on the walls. Now the graffiti — rendered in black pigment on the yellow cave walls — is providing scientists with a unique record of how climate change affected nearby communities between 1520 and 1920.

Dinosaurs used the same nests repeatedly

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 10:43:37 -0400

Troodon dinosaur eggs from China. Credit: David Varricchio.

Fossil dinosaur eggs and nests offer clues about dinosaur development and behavior: Based on past work, for example, scientists have thought that some dinosaurs, like oviraptors, brooded, or sat on their eggs, much like modern birds do. Now, the results of a new study describing two fossil egg nests suggest that some dinosaurs used the same nesting sites again and again.

Benchmarks: May 12, 2008: Earthquake devastates western China

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 13:10:21 -0400

Damage by earthquake-induced landslides in May 2008 was catastrophic and accounted for many casualties. Deadly debris flows hit the town of Qushan, which was destroyed by strong shaking and landslides. Credit: USGS, David Wald.

Just before 2:30 p.m. local time on May 12, 2008, a magnitude-7.9 earthquake shook Sichuan province in Western China. One eyewitness recalls seeing a mountain “blowing up” and boulders two-stories tall crashing into gorges. Another recalls thinking there had been a natural gas explosion, while a third described a hill split in half. It was the country’s largest earthquake in more than 50 years, and it left 18,000 people missing and presumed dead, nearly 375,000 injured and more than 69,000 confirmed fatalities.

Oldest birds unearthed in China

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 11:39:12 -0400

Two specimens of the oldest- known ornithuromorph yet discovered, Archaeornithura meemannae, thought to have been a wading bird, were recently found in China. Credit: Zongda Zhang.

The discovery of two well-preserved fossils in the Sichakou Basin of northeastern China has pushed back the known evolutionary record of birds by as much as 6 million years, according to a new study published in Nature Communications.

Soft-bodied fossils cast in fool's gold

Mon, 09 Mar 2015 11:49:18 -0400

Pyritized specimens of the wormlike Conotubus from the Gaojiashan Lagerstätte in China. Credit: Yaoping Cai, Northwest University, Xi'an China.

Most of the fossil record is composed of hard bones and shells — only a handful of places preserve fossils of soft-bodied organisms from early in Earth’s evolutionary history. The processes by which these delicate fossils form are not well understood, but a new study looking at an assemblage of 550-million-year-old soft-bodied fossils found in China sheds light on one potential mechanism.

Secondary aerosols a primary cause of Chinese smog

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 10:31:29 -0500

Taken one day apart — on Jan. 31 (top) and Feb. 1, 2013 (bottom) — these photos of Beijing's National Stadium hint at the scale of China's pollution problem. Credit: both: Ru-Jin Huang and Jun-Ji Cao.

Images of Chinese skylines and streetscapes blurred by pollution-fueled hazes have become increasingly common in recent years amid ongoing urbanization and industrialization. According to a new study published in Nature, much of the pollution fogging the country’s major cities is arising not from fine particles emitted directly into the sky, but by gases that react and condense in the atmosphere to form secondary aerosols.

Pompeii-like eruption fossilized dinosaurs in death poses

Fri, 18 Jul 2014 17:49:17 -0400

The Yixian and Jiufotang formations are famous for preserving fine details such as hair, skin and feathers from a diverse array of animals, including land dwellers, birds and freshwater fish. Careful analysis of the exquisitely preserved fossils and surrounding sediments suggests that the diverse assemblage of animals were killed by a series of sudden, lethal ash flows that swept through the area, charring the carcasses and leaving them piled in bone beds.

Longmenshan fault zone in the spotlight after two major quakes in five years

Thu, 15 May 2014 09:46:06 -0400

Credit: David Wald, USGS

In May 2008, a magnitude-7.9 earthquake struck near Wenchuan, China, killing more than 80,000 people in the country’s biggest quake since 1950. Then, in April 2013, the magnitude-6.6 Lushan earthquake hit just 90 kilometers to the south — also within China’s Longmenshan Fault Zone, which separates the Tibetan Plateau to the west from the Sichuan Basin to the east — and caused another 200 deaths. Now, scientists have found that a roughly 60-kilometer segment of the fault zone between the epicenters of the two big temblors could be the next to rupture, although no one knows when or how big it might be.

Arsenic levels in China may be predicted by modeling

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 13:44:45 -0400

Guifan Sun and his students collect water samples in China. Courtesy of Prof. Sun, China Medical University, Shenyang

In China, arsenic poisoning from groundwater has been a known chronic health issue since at least the 1970s. From 2001 to 2005, the Chinese Ministry of Health tested 450,000 wells, 13 percent of which exceeded World Health Organization (WHO) arsenic standards. However, numbers could be far worse, as only about 12 percent of Chinese counties were screened. Now, researchers from the Swiss Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and China Medical University have developed a predictive model for arsenic groundwater contamination that they say could more efficiently determine regions where high-level arsenic contamination is most likely to occur. Their results, published in Science, showed that main arsenic risk is most likely in northern China.

Asia's hazardous month