thumb|Restoration Zhongjianichthys is an extinct genus of primitive jawless fish that lived in the Cambrian Period, approximately 518 million years ago, in what is now Southwest China. As a myllokunmingiid, it is considered one of the earliest known vertebrates in the fossil record alongside the other two identified genera, Haikouichthys and Myllokunmingia. Like its confamilials, its fossils were found in the Maotianshan Shales in Yunnan province.
thumb|Restoration Zhongjianichthys is an extinct genus of primitive jawless fish that lived in the Cambrian Period, approximately 518 million years ago, in what is now Southwest China. As a myllokunmingiid, it is considered one of the earliest known vertebrates in the fossil record alongside the other two identified genera, Haikouichthys and Myllokunmingia. Like its confamilials, its fossils were found in the Maotianshan Shales in Yunnan province.
The type species, Zhongjianichthys rostratus, is named after paleontologist Yang Zhongjian (1897-1979), who was widely honored as the "Father of Chinese Vertebrate Paleontology"; although the specific epithet rostratus means "beak-like" in Latin, Shu states in the describing paper that it is in reference to the rarity of the fossils.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).