From fish to man

A bilingual book seeks to shed light on the evolution of vertebrates through the trove of fossils discovered in China. Yang Yang reports.

Jurassic World came as a mixed bag of surprises and fear. The Hollywood sci-fi feature last year gave moviegoers a new menace in the form of Indominus rex, who first faces and then destroys most of the well behaved raptors, but is later thrown into a lagoon by a Tyrannosaurus rex, which is finally eaten by a "water lizard".

Stories about dinosaurs not only help filmmakers make big bucks, they continue to fascinate people, even through nonfiction.

Now, a bilingual book written and illustrated by paleontologists from Canada, China and Australia is expected to feed readers' curiosity about the creatures that are thought to have roamed the Earth millions of years ago. From Fish to Human: The March of Vertebrate Life in China is available in both Chinese and English in the same copy.

"It's for readers in China and abroad - whoever is interested in paleontology. They will read about the latest advances in China's paleontological research," says Wang Yuan, co-author of the book and a researcher with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, an institution affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

He is an expert on amphibians and reptiles.

Corwin Sullivan, co-author of the book, is Wang's colleague from the IVPP. He laughs along with Wang at their office as they together imagine a scene from what they call a future Jurassic Park movie, in which an attack is launched by a large carnivorous dinosaur covered with feathers.

"It would be like a huge killer chicken," the Canadian paleontologist says.

Feathered dinosaurs weren't part of the first movie in the series because the original novel, Jurassic Park, published in 1990, came out before the first known fossil of a feathered dinosaur, Sinosauropteryx prima, was discovered. That happened in China six years later, he says.

The scientists then point to a small, fluffy, long-tailed dinosaur that appears in From Fish to Human.

Sullivan wrote the English version of the book, while Wang translated it into Chinese and Brian Choo drew some of the beautiful illustrations, including one based on the earliest fish fossils - which existed more than 530 million years ago - that were discovered in Chengjiang county in Southwest China's Yunnan province in 1984.

"I was trying to write in a way that you wouldn't have to be already familiar with a lot of the concepts and terminology to understand the book," Sullivan says.

Scientists say that the first vertebrate on Earth appeared in the sea and, hundreds of millions of years ago, the first curious fish made its entry on land. Eventually, fish evolved into other species - frogs, snakes, dinosaurs, birds and humans.

In the book, Sullivan writes: "As greatly modified lobefined fish, we humans stroll about on our pelvic fins and use our pectoral fins to turn the pages of books like the one you are reading now."

Wang asks: "We want to know what's going on. How did we evolve from the primitive fish to the present stage? Are we the end of the world?"

The book project lasted two and a half years.

The authors selected 15 representative biotas and fauna based on fossils discovered around China to show the nine key transitional events through the fish-to-human evolutionary process, talking about not only the stories of the fossils but also internationally well-known paleontologists who discovered them.

The 15 biotas include the Chengjiang Biota, from which the oldest known fish on Earth is said to have appeared,which is linked to the first key transition - the emergence of the backbone. Then, there is the Jehol Biota, from which the first feathered dinosaur fossil was discovered, that's linked to the eighth key transition-the evolution of feathers. Then the book moves on to the Zhoukoudian Site,where the remains of the Peking man were discovered,marking the origin of early humans.

"We wrote about fauna that represent different geological ages. We selected the most-representative fauna to represent each age... to show what was happening in vertebrates' evolution at those specific times,"Wang says.

Because of people's love of dinosaur stories, they've devoted five of 15 chapters in the book to the extinct animals.

Many difficult decisions had to be made while picking fauna and fossils for the book.

"We couldn't have covered everything. There are a lot more Chinese fossil records than there are in the book. It's a good look at Chinese fossil records-not absolutely comprehensive, but it does give a good sampling of what China has," Sullivan says.

Another important discussion in the book is about feathered dinosaurs found in the Jehol Biota of the early Cretaceous in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, and Liaoning and Hebei provinces, where-due to special geological conditions - soft tissue can be seen clearly in fossils even after more than 100 million years.

Dinosaurs, in a traditional view, have scales, but some fossils found in China suggest the creatures had feathers as well, such as the smaller,more primitive cousins of Tyrannosaurs - Yutyrannus huali and Sinosauropteryx prima. Although they had feathers, they both were still dinosaurs and the feathers on their bodies were not used for flying.

The feathers on these dinosaurs are similar in material to birds' but differ in shape, Sullivan says.

"Unlike flake-like feathers, or pennaceous feathers that can overlap and form an aerodynamic surface, filamentous feathers on those dinosaurs could not be used to fly," Sullivan says.

The discovery of Sinosauropteryx fossils helped to prove that dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds, rather than merely being descended from a common ancestor.

Contact the writer at yangyangs@chinadaily.com.cn