Ren Xinyi. Female. A doctor in the Department of Geology at Northwest University in Xi'an, China, majoring in paleontology and stratigraphy. Her research mainly focuses on the evolution of mineralization characteristics of benthic organisms during the Cambrian explosion and the evolution of early Paleozoic marine benthic communities and biomineralization, such as corals, brachiopods, sponges, and phoronids. She is skilled at integrating non-destructive new technological methods with traditional research methods to extract the two-dimensional morphology, geochemical composition, and three-dimensional morphology of skeletal fossils as much as possible without causing damage. She connects fossils preserved in carbonate and clastic rocks, making the research perspective more comprehensive and less likely to miss microscopic details. She is dedicated to analyzing the microscopic world of fossils and discovering some biological anatomical structures that cannot be detected by conventional research methods, providing first-hand fresh data for the origin and evolution of animals.
Dr. Hu is now a postdoc in the Department of Geology at Northwest University in Xi’an, China. He got his Ph.D. at the Department of Geology at Northwest University in 2022. His research is mainly on the Cambrian explosion and on the aspects of small shelly fossils and trace fossils from North China and South China.
Mei Luo is a doctoral student in the Department of Geology at Northwest University, China. She received her bachelor's degree in 2022 and went to the Natural History Museum Braunschweig, Germany, for joint training from February to May 2024. Her research area is the Precambrian-Cambrian small shelly fossil assemblages and biostratigraphy in the southern Shaanxi Province of China.
Caibin Zhang is a doctoral student in the Department of Geology at Northwest University, China. His research area is mineralization in the microstructure of early Cambrian shell fossils. Focusing on the similarities and differences between Lophotrochozoans and Ecdysozoa in the structure of epidermal tissues and the process of exoskeletal mineralization.
Prof. Dr. Zhifei Zhang is currently a professor at the State Key Laboratory of Continental Dynamics, Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Early Life and Environments, and Department of Geology, Northwest University, Xi’an, China. He earned his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 2006. He is currently the vice president of Northwest University. From 2009 to 2010, he was a visiting scholar at Uppsala University in Sweden. His research field focuses on the Cambrian explosion and crested wheel animals.
