Meet Ni Jingchen: The 12-year-old Beijing student who posted a strange fossil online and helped reveal Asia’s first Jurassic amphibian footprint | World News

Representative Image of a child examining ancient fossil footprints preserved in rock in Mentougou, Beijing (AI-generated image)

In early 2025, 12-year-old Ni Jingchen was out exploring with his parents in Beijing’s Mentougou district when he noticed two tiny marks on a slab of exposed rock. Ni already loved fossils and knew enough to realise that the strange impressions were worth a closer look, so he photographed them and shared the find online. He had no idea that his casual discovery would eventually bring professional palaeontologists to the site and reveal something scientists had never documented in Asia before. Associate professor Xing Lida of the China University of Geosciences in Beijing saw the photographs and organised a team to investigate. Their analysis showed that the slab preserved a forefoot and hind-foot track made by a small amphibian roughly 160 million years ago, during the Middle Jurassic. The animal most likely belonged to Salamandroidea, the group that includes modern salamanders, making Ni’s find the first scientifically described Jurassic amphibian track record from China and Asia.

Why the tiny tracks had never been recorded anywhere in Asia before

Before this discovery, Jurassic vertebrate track records from the Beijing region were dominated by dinosaurs and turtles, with no amphibian tracks reported. The new fossil consists of two impressions preserved on a single slab near Jiulong Road in Longquan town, Mentougou district. Researchers interpreted them as a connected forefoot-hind-foot pair, probably produced by the same animal as it moved across the sediment. The better-preserved forefoot measures about 1.5 centimetres long and 1.3 centimetres wide and shows four slender, pointed digits arranged in a fan-like pattern. The hind-foot impression is less clearly preserved and contains five indistinct digit traces. Their relative size, spacing and orientation support the interpretation that the two impressions were produced by the same animal.

How researchers identified the tracks as belonging to a salamander-like amphibian

To extract as much detail as possible from marks barely larger than a fingernail, the research team used photogrammetric three-dimensional modelling to build high-resolution digital reconstructions of the tracks, allowing them to examine subtle surface features. The findings were formally published in the paper Possible caudata tracks from the Middle Jurassic Yaopo Formation in Beijing, China in the peer-reviewed journal Ichnos. After comparing the morphology of the impressions with known amphibian tracks, the researchers concluded that the trackmaker most likely belonged to Salamandroidea, a group that includes modern salamanders and related tailed amphibians. The tracks come from the Middle Jurassic Yaopo Formation, a coal-bearing geological unit in the Mentougou area that has also yielded plant fossils including ferns, ginkgoes and cycads. Taken together, the evidence indicates that small, land-adapted amphibians lived in what researchers interpret as a lake-swamp environment in the region roughly 160 million years ago.

Why Ni’s discovery shows how amateur fossil hunters can contribute to science

The discovery began not with a professional fossil survey but with a schoolboy who noticed something unusual in an exposed rock surface. After Ni shared photographs of the specimen online, Xing Lida became aware of the find and led the subsequent investigation. Xing has described the discovery as an example of public participation in paleontological research, particularly highlighting how young fossil enthusiasts can contribute to science when they pay close attention to geological exposures.For scientists, the significance extends beyond the novelty of finding two tiny tracks. The fossil provides direct evidence that amphibians occupied Middle Jurassic landscapes in northern China and adds a previously missing component to the region’s vertebrate track record. The authors say further discoveries from the Yaopo Formation could help researchers reconstruct the area’s ancient environment in greater detail, including the diversity of animals that inhabited the plant-rich lake and swamp ecosystems that existed around 160 million years ago.