2 Living Fossils Found in China

Ask a Chinese person and they will tell you China had it first. China has the oldest. China has the most. It was invented first in the Middle Kingdom. It is everything. So, why not ‘living fossils’ too? There are at least two living fossils in China. The Chinese sturgeon and Chinese alligator.

China sent five pre-historic Chinese sturgeons to Hong Kong’s Ocean Park. The never-t0-be sashimi dish is called “living fossil of fish” or “Giant Panda in the water.” Hong Kong’s visitors are home to the only human-bred Chinese sturgeons living in sea water. Why five? To coincide with the Beijing Olympics. What pre-historic fish have to do with the modern Olympics is beyond me. The sturgeon species supposedly dates back to the Cretaceous period when dinosaurs still roamed the land. It seems to me that most fish were here from the beginning. Even the Flood of Noah’s time couldn’t snuff them out.

Meanwhile -

fishermen (alligatorermen?) have found a wild Chinese alligator that is also being referred to as a living fossil. The alligator was guessed to be about 40-years old. (Why didn’t they just ask?). It was the first sighting of an alligator in the district of Wuhu in more than 30 years. This alligator species was supposedly very plentiful some 230 million years ago (if you believe the Earth is that old), but now there are only about 150 in the wild. The Yangtze alligator as it is also known is one of the world’s most endangered creatures. Gosh, what would Marco Polo say if he saw this fellow?  Since 1979, the Chinese Alligator Breeding Research Center in Anhui has seen the number of alligators at the center rise from about 200 to more than 10,000.

source &

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe for updates to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting and please do come back!