CHINA

Trilobites are the most important early Palaeozoic fossils of China because they are relatively frequent, often nicely preserved, and allow a precise age assignment of the strata in which they occur. They are also important for its characterization of the regions with different depositional environments and contribute to the distinctions of the different palaeogeographic regions within present-day China. In the early Palaeozoic, this realm was not only distributed on two different continents (termed the South China or Yangtze Platform, and the North China or Sinokorean Platform). The South China continent was also differentiated into a platform and a slope region. Consequently, rocks of the same age can have at least three distinctly different trilobite faunas.

One of the areas in which the platform and the slope facies are closely associated is the northwestern Hunan Province. For the early Ordovician Tremadocian Stage, the differences in the more or less coeval trilobites from the platform and the slope environments were intricately studied by Peng in his 1990 monograph, and offers an almost global comparison. The offered trilobites come from the key sections of this study.