Paleontologists have found an ancient fossil bed during a field trip to the Qaidam Basin in northwest China.

The fossil groups are about 550 million years old. They are the oldest fossil groups ever discovered on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences said.

The fossil bed lies in the Quanjishan area on the northern edge of the Qaidam Basin. It contains fossils of living things believed to have existed in the late Ediacaran Period. This period came before the Cambrian Explosion, but a variety of complex mollusk types already existed in ancient oceans, said Pang Ke, with the institute.

The discovery also indicates that the Qaidam Plate and the North China Plate were "close neighbors," according to the research project team headed by Pang.

"During the long period of tectonic evolution, various plates connected and broke off," Pang said. "About 550 million years ago, the Qaidam Plate, mainly formed by the Qaidam Basin, was not connected with the North China Plate, which includes swaths of northern China."

"The Quanjishan area, which is more than 3,000 meters above sea level now, was an ocean at that time," Pang added.

The team's research results have been published in the international journal Geology.

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