Abstract Starting in the early 1950s, palaeontologists began to discover a wide range of Cretaceous terrestrial fossils in the Laiyang, Qingshan and Wangshi groups of the Jiaolai Basin, which resides in the eastern part of the Shandong Peninsula of northern China. Significant specimens from these deposits include various dinosaur eggs, footprints and fossils, including hadrosauroids, tyrannosaurids and ankylosaurids. These expanded the understanding of evolution, biodiversity and palaeoecology in East Asia. While many examples of the Jehol Biota from this area are not well constrained in terms of their stratigraphy and geochronology, previous studies have generally suggested that fossils from this region represent the second or third phase of Jehol Biota development. This paper reviews fossils, stratigraphic correlations, tectonic history and age estimates for the less well-studied outcrops of the Shandong Peninsula that host the Jehol Biota. We report three new 40 Ar/ 39 Ar ages for the Qingshang Group and discuss how these somewhat imprecise ages still constrain chronostratigraphic interpretation for the fossil-rich units.

Abstract The Jiaodong gold province, within the eastern margin of the North China block and the translated northeastern edge of the South China block, has a stated premining gold resource exceeding 4,500 metric tons (t). It is thus one of the world’s largest gold provinces, with a present cumulative annual production estimated at 60 t Au. More than 90% of the Jiaodong gold resource is hosted by batholiths and related bodies of the Linglong (ca. 160–145 Ma) and, to a lesser degree, Guojialing (ca. 130–122 Ma) suites. The intrusions were emplaced into high-grade metamorphic basement rocks of the Precambrian Jiaobei (North China block) and Sulu (South China block) terranes during a 70-m.y.-period of lithospheric delamination, extensional core complex formation, and exhumation. The deposits are located about 20 to 200 km to the east of the continental-scale NNE-striking Tancheng-Lujiang (Tan-Lu) strike-slip fault system. They occur along a series of more regional NNE- to NE-striking brittle and ductile-brittle faults, which appear to intersect the Tan-Lu main structure to the southwest. This system of early to middle Mesozoic regional thrust faults, reactivated during Cretaceous normal motion and ore formation, tends to occur along the margins of the main Linglong batholiths or between intrusions of the two suites of granitoids. Orebodies are mainly present as quartz-pyrite veins (Linglong-type) and as stockwork veinlets and disseminated mineralization (Jiaojia-type). The two mineralization styles are transitional and may be present within the same gold deposit. The ca. 120 Ma timing of gold mineralization correlates with major changes in plate kinematics in the Pacific Basin and the onset of seismicity along the Tan-Lu fault system, with the enormous fluid volumes and associated metal being derived from sediment devolatilization above the westerly subducting Izanagi slab.