Edison Tse (right), sitting next to his supervisor Michael Pittman, doesn’t look so thrilled to have made an important discovery at 22, but we guess you don’t have time to have fun when you’re a young, gifted scientist.
Edison Tse, a 22-year-old Hongkonger who completed his undergrad at HKU in 2014, has discovered Hong Kong’s first dinosaur-era vertebrate: a small fish that lived in Sai Kung waters almost 150 million years ago, in the late Jurassic period.
Tse, who studied Earth Sciences, made the epic discovery while doing research for his final-year project, and we bet he got pretty good marks for it.
The fossil.
Though he gets all the credit, the fossil was actually already in the collections of the Stephen Hui Geological Museum.
The grunt work was done, but Tse is the one who figured out what the fossil was exactly.
The fish, from the genus Paralycoptera, was discovered in rocks at Lai Chi Chong in Tolo Channel.
Where it was found.
“Our Paralycoptera specimen appears to have lived in a tropical-subtropical freshwater lake that was periodically subjected to catastrophic volcanic eruptions and earthquakes,” explained the over-accomplished Tse.
Yeah, we’re pretty glad we didn’t live in Hong Kong back then.
The last time a major vertebrate fossil was identified was 35 years ago, before Tse was even born, when Lee Cho-min discovered a 370-million-year-old fish, also near Lai Chi Chong.
