The Wangmo Biota: A Flourishing Early Triassic Marine Ecosystem from Guizhou, South China

The Early Triassic Wangmo Biota from Guizhou, South China, represents one of the earliest known exceptionally preserved fossil Lagerstätten of the Triassic. This biota records a highly diverse community encompassing at least six phyla and 14 distinct taxonomic groups, including fish, conodonts, mollusks, arthropods, and other marine organisms. This biota dates from the late Dienerian to the early Smithian in the Early Triassic based on the conodonts. Such high biodiversity indicates that a flourishing marine ecosystem had achieved rapid recovery merely about one million years after the unprecedented End-Permian Mass Extinction event (EPME). The Wangmo Biota is highly similar to the Guiyang Biota in biological composition and geological age, suggesting that a widespread and stable marine environment existed in South China during the Early Triassic, which was capable of sustaining such diverse ecosystems. These unique biotas provide new materials for exploring the composition and structure of early post-extinction biological communities. The exceptional depositional environment of the Wangmo Biota not only preserves detailed structures of organismal hard parts, but also retains soft tissues in some specimens, offering crucial evidence for revealing the anatomy, ecological habits and interspecific interactions of organisms. It is of irreplaceable value for understanding the trajectory of ecosystem recovery following the most severe mass extinction event in Earth’s history. Diverse fish, mollusks, arthropods and coprolites collectively reveal a complex food web structure consisting of predators, herbivores and scavengers, further demonstrating that the marine ecosystem had not only regained species richness but also reconstructed functional complexity by this time. This finding revises the previous view of a prolonged and slow recovery of life after the EPME, highlights the resilience and adaptability of life under extreme environmental disturbances, and provides a new perspective for a more comprehensive understanding of the Early Triassic marine biodiversity and biological recovery processes.