Abstract Mesozoic continental basins of northern China, including the Junggar Basin, provide some of the most spectacular and important fossil assemblages in the world, but their climatic and environmental contexts have been shrouded in uncertainty. Here we examine the main factors that determine those contexts: palaeolatitude; the effects of changing atmospheric gases on the radiative balance; and orbitally paced variations in insolation. Empirical evidence of these factors is accumulating rapidly and promises to upend many long-standing paradigms. We focus primarily on the Junggar Basin in Xinjiang, NW China, with the renowned Shishugou Biota, and the basins in Liaoning, Hebei and Inner Mongolia with their famous Jehol and Yanliao biotas. Accurate geochronology is necessary to disentangle these various factors, and we review the Late Triassic to Early Cretaceous U–Pb ages for these areas and supply a new laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry age for the otherwise un-dated Sangonghe Formation of Early Jurassic age. We review climate-sensitive facies patterns in North China and show that the climatic context changed synchronously in northwestern and northeastern China consistent with a previously proposed huge Late Jurassic–earliest Cretaceous true polar wander event, with all the major plates of East Asia docked with Siberia and moving together since at least the Triassic when the North China basins were at Arctic latitudes. We conclude that this true polar wander shift was responsible for the coal beds and ice-rafted debris being produced at high latitudes and the red beds and aeolian strata being deposited at low latitudes within the same basin. The climatic and taphonomic context in which the famous Shishugou, Yanliao and Jehol biotas were preserved was thus a function of true polar wander, as opposed to local tectonics or climate change.

Abstract Dysmorphoptilidae is a renowned extinct family of hemipteran insects that is easily distinguished by its bizarrely shaped forewings and distinctive venation. Although widespread in the Early Permian to Mid Jurassic, this family has extremely rarely been recorded in China. Herein one new genus and two new species, Dysmorphoptila gobiensis sp. nov. and Guchinus xinjiangensis gen. et sp. nov., are described from the Lower Jurassic Badaowan Formation of the Junggar Basin, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, NW China, representing the first Jurassic Dysmorphoptilidae from northern China. We present a detailed morphological comparison of all known genera and species of Dysmorphoptilidae and a phylogenetic tree based on eight genera and species with relatively complete tegminal characters. The tree indicates that the present subfamilial classification of Dysmorphoptilidae is questionable. A large-scale diversification in forewing venation probably occurred during the Triassic, possibly coeval with the palaeogeographical radiation and ecological adaptation of Dysmorphoptilidae. Our results provide new insights into the evolution and occurrence of this family.