When doing this self-driving China plan, we became very interested in the world natural heritage - the Chengjiang Fossil Group. It is also the second world heritage site we arrived at after our visit to Kaiping Diaolou in Guangdong. This scenic spot is about 12 kilometers away from Chengjiang County, just navigate. At present, it is only suitable for self-driving travel, and there is no public transportation yet. It is 70 kilometers away from Kunming, and you can enjoy the beautiful scenery of Yangzonghai on the way. It is about 10 kilometers away from Fuxian Lake. The opening hours of the scenic spot are from 8 am to 5:30 pm.
This is hidden at the foot of Maotian Mountain in Chengjiang County, Yunnan Province, beside Fuxian Lake, in a long and narrow area with a length of 20 kilometers, a width of 4.5 kilometers, and a depth of about 50 meters. The buried paleontological fossils of 16 categories and more than 200 species originated from the "explosion of life" in the Cambrian period 530 million years ago, resulting in more than 30 years of research and discussion in paleontology and geology.
More than 100 years ago, the famous British biologist Darwin put forward the theory of evolution. After more than a century of evolution and development, its core is still "the development of organisms is linear". Simply put, the development of organisms is a tree-like organization. Slow and continuous mutations to better adapt to the natural environment and the jungle. Some species did not adapt to the environment and died out, some species adapted to the environment and continued to exist, and some species mutated in order to better adapt to the environment and continue to exist in another form today. But their ancestors all happened for a reason, and they have evolved and developed over a long period of time.
On July 1, 1984, the Chengjiang fossil group discovered by Mr. Hou Xianguang, a paleontologist, is the best-preserved early Cambrian paleontological fossil group so far, and it is also the area with the most paleontological categories so far. They are hidden in yellow-green silty shale. After time calculation, these more than 200 species were produced in two to three million years. In today's archaeology, in the Pre-Cambrian Era of 540 million years, life only existed in two or three types of algae and fungi in the ocean. Therefore, the two to three million year change is called the "Cambrian Explosion of Life".
Is two or three million years long? Calculated according to the age of the earth of 4.55 billion years, two to three million years is just an instant, converted into 24 hours a day, this period is only about 1 minute. So there have been more than 30 years of paleontology and geology's questioning and discussion of Darwin's theory of evolution (the theory of gradual change).
The venue is small and there is only one guide.
Yunnan worm, the earliest chordate, which is also the earliest ancestor of human beings.
Odd shrimp, at that time firmly occupied the dominance of the ocean, the top of the food chain. The largest can grow to more than two meters. Today's voices are divided into three factions 1 Opposition (some of them are Christians) The evolution of creatures is not a natural tree, but someone "inserted" and "arranged", implying the result of God's arrangement.
2 Supporting faction 1 Darwin's theory of evolution is correct, but the "gradual change theory" may not be comprehensive, and at a specific time, there may be a "jump change" result.
3 Proponents 2 In the billions of years before the Cambrian, the geological structure was very fragile, so the organisms before the Cambrian could not be well preserved or have not been discovered so far. And nowadays, in terms of the interpretation of the word "evolution", "evolution" is more preferred. Biology is not to become more advanced, but to survive. Since we are not Christians, we are more inclined to the second and third theories. On July 1, 2012, Chengjiang Fossil Site, after eight years of applying for World Heritage Sites, was selected as China's World Natural Heritage at the 36th World Heritage Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, filling the blank of China's fossil natural heritage. It is also one of only three fossil heritage sites in the world.