China announces top 10 paleontological advances of 2022

BEIJING -- The Palaeontological Society of China on Friday announced the country's top 10 paleontological advances of 2022.

The selected breakthroughs include the Silurian fossils revealing the rise and diversity of early jawed vertebrates, the ancient genomes revealing Xinjiang population history over the past 5,000 years, and the evolution of key ecology behaviors of Mesozoic insects, according to the list released by the PSC.

Other advances on the list involve the sexual selection that promotes head-neck specific evolution in giraffes, changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide content revealing the mechanism of the end-Permian mass extinction, and the world's first mapping of tiger ancient genomes.

The breakthroughs were made by researchers from the country's research institutes and universities, such as the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Nanjing University.

The PSC, founded in 1929, is one of China's earliest academic organizations dealing with the natural sciences. Its annual top 10 list covers the country's main paleontological discoveries that have promoted the domestic and global development of the field.