Discovery And Significance Of Mesozoic Jehol Biota In Qilin Hill, Hongshan District, Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia

“Jehol Biota”was first proposed by Grabau in 1923, and later supplemented and improved by Gu Zhiwei of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Since then, the fossil assemblage containing Lycoptera , Peipiaosteus , Ephemeropsis trisetalis , Eosestheria is known as Jehol Biota. Over the past 20 years, a large number of vertebrate fossils of Jehol Biota have been found. It not only has very significant in each important category of vertebrates evolution, the biostratigraphy and palaeogeography & paleoenvironment studies, but also provides rare materials to analyze the biodiversity in the terrestrial ecosystem in this geological time. After recent years of work, the Mesozoic Jehol Biota and related strata research in western Liaoning have achieved great progress; in some field, the domestic studies have reached the top international level. From the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, Chinese scholars always focus on the studies about the origins of birds, mammals and angiosperms, which led to raise the study level of the Jehol Biota, and some studies have entered the international advanced level.The fossil locality in Qilin Hill, Chifeng City is just located in the area between Ningcheng and western Liaoning, with a good geographical position, where is a very significant locality to bridge the two areas above on the regional stratigraphic correlation. In 2009, China University of Geoscience (Beijing) and Bureau of Land and Resources, Chifeng City, Inner Mongolia jointly initiated a first scientific and systematic fossil excavation in the study area. The main targets are to investigate the distribution of the Mesozoic fossil-containing layers, and to propose reasonable protection measures for the fossile locality. Through the systematically scientific excavation, a lot of valuable fossils are obtained, including Ephemeropsis trisetalis, Lycoptera, Manchurochelys, Monjurosuchus, Ikechosaurus, Sinornithosaurus etc. Based on a preliminary study, this paper considers these fossils basically belong to the Jehol Biota. According to the fossils and stratigraphic correlation with surrounding areas, such as Ningcheng, Inner Mongolia and western-Liaoning-and-northern-Hebei, this paper considers that the fossil-containing strata belong to the lower-middle part of Yixian Formation (Lower Cretaceous). Through this first fossil excavation and analysis, we think that more significant fossils will be buried in the lower un-excavated strata. Therefore, based on the study above, this paper points out the next working direction.