YNU doctor publishes study on vetulicola in early Cambrian

Doctor Li Yujing of the Institute of Paleontology, Yunnan University (YNU) and the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom conducted a brand new paleoecological study on vetulicola, a typical representative of the world natural heritage Chengjiang Fossil Lagerstatte.

The result of the study was titled "Symbiotic fouling of Vetulicola, an early Cambrian nektonic animal" and published in the journal Communications Biology, an open access journal from Nature Research that publishes high-quality research, reviews, and commentary in all areas of the biological sciences.

The research by Dr Li found that there are symbiotic hard-shelled tubular organisms in metazoans, which represent the earliest known fossil record of symbiotic relationships in metazoans.

This discovery reveals that the early Cambrian marine ecosystems have evolved ecological dimensions, such as endosymbiosis, and indicates that the complexity of the marine ecosystem in the early Cambrian is far more complex than previously known.

"We are very surprised by this symbiosis in the body," said Professor Mark Williams of the University of Leicester, the co-author of the paper. "The discovery traces this ecological relationship back to Cambrian marine animals 518 million years ago, which shows the complex symbiotic relationship has become one of the driving forces of the early Cambrian metazoan radiation process."

Dr Li is the first author of the paper and her co-supervisor, researcher Cong Peiyun, is the co-corresponding author.

The project has obtained funding from the Yunnan Key Laboratory for Palaeontology, the Postdoctoral Research Station of Ecology of YNU, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, as well as the Yunnan Provincial Science and Technology Department.

Those who are interested can visit https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-020-01244-1 to read the original paper.