Fossils preserved by ‘Pompeii-style’ volcanic action
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A TREASURE trove of dinosaur and other fossils in northeast China was created, Pompeii-style, by a volcanic eruption, scientists said yesterday.
A seam of rock known as the Yixian and Jiufotang formations, in the west of Liaoning Province, is the burial ground of an astonishing array of creatures that lived 120 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous period.
Called the Jehol Biota, it is the richest and widest source of fossils ever found, according to experts.
It has yielded the remains of dinosaurs, pterosaurs, early birds and mammals, as well as turtles, lizards, fish, frogs, plants and insects, which inhabited a long-gone vista of lakes and conifer forests.
Many of the specimens are astonishingly well preserved, revealing even scales, feathers, hair or skin.
The secret of the preservation, according to a study led by Jiang Baoyu of Nanjing University in eastern Jiangsu Province, lies in a brutal volcanic episode that extinguished life all around and then buried it in dust, locking it away.
Jiang’s team looked closely at 14 bird and dinosaur fossils and the thin layer of darkish sediment in which they were found at five locations.
The big killer, they believe, was pyroclastic flow — a vicious outpouring of hot, suffocating gas and superfine dust, moving at gale-force speed.
Under the microscope, debris from plants showed blackened carbon streaks, and in the fossilized skeletons, hollow bones were filled with quartz grains.
But the biggest indicator of all came from crisscrossed cracks at the bone edges, caused by heat stress.
This phenomenon was found in the bones of victims at Pompeii, the Roman town that was buried by an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, the authors said.
Previous researchers noted that the Jehol Biota sediment was volcanic.
But suspicions that an eruption was to blame lacked hard evidence until now.
“Terrestrial vertebrate carcasses transported by and sealed within the pyroclastic flows were clearly preserved as exceptional fossils,” said the paper, published in Nature Communications.
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