The Qingjiang biota are a major discovery of fossilized remains dating from the early Cambrian period approximately 518 million years ago.^[1] The remains consist at least 20,000 individual specimens, and were discovered near the Danshui River in the Hubei province of China in 2019.^[2] The site is particularly notable due to both the large proportion of new taxa represented (approximately 53% of the specimens),^[1] and due to the large amount of soft-body tissue of the ancient specimens that was preserved, likely due to the organisms being rapidly covered in sediment prior to fossilization, that allowed for the detailed preservation of even fragile, soft-bodied creatures such as worms and jellyfish.

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Chinese. (October 2022) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Chinese article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Chinese Wikipedia article at [[:zh:清江生物群]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|zh|清江生物群}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (October 2022) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Site fossilifère de Qingjiang]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|fr|Site fossilifère de Qingjiang}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The site is a Burgess Shale type preservation,^[1] and has been widely compared^[1][3][4] to the Burgess Shale in terms of the site's richness and significance. The discovery has been described as one of the most significant of its kind in the last 100 years.^[2] Initial publications regarding the site stated that 4,351 of the collected specimens had been examined,^[2] and 101 species had been identified, 53 of which were new to science.^[5]

Talks are reportedly underway with local government to protect the site to ensure the longevity of continued research on the deposited specimens.^[4]