Photo: Snapshot of China News

Chinese paleontologists have discovered seven fossils of ammonoids, a group of marine mollusks that lived 182 million years ago, in South China's Guangdong Province, China News reported on Wednesday.

The seven fossils, discovered in January, were later determined by Chinese paleontologists from the Guangdong Provincial Institute of Geology to be corolla ammonoids, an invertebrate that lived in the ocean during the Jurassic period some 182 million years ago.

Du Yanli, curator of the Heyuan Dinosaur Museum, said that ammonoids lived from the Middle Ordovician to the Late Cretaceous. Ammonoids first appeared in the early Paleozoic Devonian (about 400 million years ago), flourished during the Mesozoic (about 225 million years ago), and were widely distributed in the Triassic oceans around the world. They went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period (about 66 million years ago).

This discovery has important scientific research value into geological research inferring that the Heyuan area was once at the bottom of the ocean.

Chinese paleontologists have also found some dinosaur skeletons in the Heyuan area that provide more evidence that dinosaurs evolved into birds, according to China News.