Chinese scientists have discovered that the 530-million-year-old fish-like fossils they found in the town of Haikou near Kunming, the capital city of southwest China's Yunnan Province, are ancestors of vertebrates.

Chen Junyuan, a research fellow with the Nanjing Institute of Paleontology and Geology attached to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, his assistant Huang Diying and his colleague Lee Chia-wei from the National Tsinghua University discovered over 300 fish-like fossils in Haikou in Taiwan early April. After careful examination of the fish-like fossils, they discovered that these fossils date back some 530 million years and are considered to be the first craniate chordates with a clear head and a large brain. Chen and his colleagues have called the fish-like fossils "Haikouella".

In 1995, Chen and his colleagues discovered what they thought to be the earliest of vertebrates in Yunnan, the Yunnanzoon (a primitive chordate). However, the 530 million-year-old Haikouella they found this April has changed all that.

After watching the 300 specimens of Haikouella, Professor Nicholas Holland, a noted American lancelet specialist from the University of California at San Diego, said the discovery was "a spectacular advance in our efforts to reconstruct the history of life on earth."