Qualla: Nanxiong Formation

Nanxiong Formation: Introduction

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ddinodan, CC BY 4.0. Sixty-six point seven million years ago, the world was about to end for the dinosaurs — and in a basin tucked into the mountains of northern Guangdong, some of the last of them left behind extraordinary evidence of their final chapter. The Nanxiong Formation is that evidence: a thick band of deep red rock, compressed from ancient river sediments, that preserves a remarkable snapshot of life at the very close of the Cretaceous period. Farmers have been pulling strange bones and eggs from these ruddy soils for generations. Scientists have been following ever since.

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Image: Ddinodan | CC BY 4.0

Nanxiong Formation: Red Rock, Deep Time

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Danny Cicchetti, CC BY-SA 3.0. Drive north from Guangzhou toward the border with Jiangxi and the landscape shifts. The subtropical lowlands give way to folded hills, and the soil turns a vivid, almost rusty red. That color tells the geological story: the Nanxiong Basin formed when Mesozoic rifting split the un...

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Image: Danny Cicchetti | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nanxiong Formation: A Cast of Extraordinary Creatures

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TotalDino, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Nanxiong Formation has produced a fauna strikingly rich in variety. Sauropods lumbered through — titanosaurian giants whose fossilized remains include several newly described species, among them Gandititan cavocaudatus, formally named in 2024, which extended the known diversi...

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Image: TotalDino | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nanxiong Formation: The Egg Hunters

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerbil, CC BY-SA 3.0. If one discovery has made the Nanxiong Formation famous beyond specialist circles, it is the eggs. Thousands of dinosaur eggs have emerged from these red beds, many of them elongatoolithid eggs produced by oviraptorids — crested, beaked theropods that sat on their nests like bird...

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Image: Gerbil | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nanxiong Formation: Beyond the Dinosaurs

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Junchang Lü, Hanyong Pu, Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, Li Xu, Huali Chang, Yuhua Shang, Di Liu, Yuong-Nam Lee, Martin Kundrát and Caizhi Shen, CC BY 4.0. The formation's richness extends well beyond the famous headline animals. Crocodyloids of the genus Jiangxisuchus — known from a nearly complete skull and mandible — inhabited the ancient waterways. Turtles of the family Nanhsiungchelyidae left their shells behind, along with tri...

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Image: Junchang Lü, Hanyong Pu, Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, Li Xu, Huali Chang, Yuhua Shang, Di Liu, Yuong-Nam Lee, Martin Kundrát and Caizhi Shen | CC BY 4.0

Nanxiong Formation: Fieldwork and Ongoing Discovery

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Junchang Lü, Hanyong Pu, Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, Li Xu, Huali Chang, Yuhua Shang, Di Liu, Yuong-Nam Lee, Martin Kundrát & Caizhi Shen, CC BY 4.0. Research on the Nanxiong Formation accelerated sharply after the 1980s, as Chinese and international paleontologists gained greater access to the region around Ganzhou city in Jiangxi Province — where many of the formation's most productive exposures lie — and the Nanxiong Basin ...

Read more: Nanxiong Formation on Qualla

Image: Junchang Lü, Hanyong Pu, Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, Li Xu, Huali Chang, Yuhua Shang, Di Liu, Yuong-Nam Lee, Martin Kundrát & Caizhi Shen | CC BY 4.0