Jing Lu

• PhD
• Research at Chinese Academy of Sciences

Although the superbly preserved specimens of Onychodus jandemarrai have greatly advanced our understanding of the Onychodontiformes, a primitive sarcopterygian group with large parasymphysial tooth whorls, the scarcity of the otoccipital material in the group hampers further morphological comparisons between onychodonts and other sarcopterygian gro...

Recent discoveries of advanced fish-like stem-tetrapods (for example, Panderichthys and Tiktaalik) have greatly improved our knowledge of the fin-to-limb transition. However, a paucity of fossil data from primitive finned tetrapods prevents profound understanding of the acquisition sequence of tetrapod characters. Here we report a new stem-tetrapod...

Osteichthyans comprise two divisions, each containing over 32,000 living species [1]: Sarcopterygii (lobe-finned fishes and tetrapods) and Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes). Recent discoveries from China highlight the morphological disparity of early sarcopterygians and extend their origin into the late Silurian [2–4]. By contrast, the oldest unam...

Crown or modern sarcopterygians (coelacanths, lungfishes, and tetrapods) differ substantially from stem sarcopterygians, such as Guiyu and Psarolepis, and a lack of transitional fossil taxa limits our understanding of the origin of the crown group. The Onychodontiformes, an enigmatic Devonian predatory fish group, seems to have characteristics of b...

Discoveries of putative stem sarcopterygians from the late Silurian and Early Devonian of South China have increased our knowledge of the initial diversification of osteichthyans while also highlighting incongruities in character evolution in this major jawed vertebrate group. Character-rich endocrania are incompletely preserved for early bony fish...

Palaeospondylus gunni Traquair, 1890, is represented by thousands of similarly preserved articulated fossils from Achannaras quarry (∼390 Mya) in Caithness, Scotland. With radically different interpretations of its structure, it has been assigned to almost all major jawless and jawed vertebrate groups. Here we report a new and older species of Pala...

X-ray computed tomography (CT) has been an important technology in paleontology for several decades. It helps researchers to acquire detailed anatomical structures of fossils non-destructively. Despite its widespread application, developing an efficient and user-friendly method for segmenting CT data continues to be a formidable challenge in the fi...

X-ray computed tomography (CT) has been an important technology in paleontology for several decades. It helps researchers to acquire detailed anatomical structures of fossils non-destructively. Despite its widespread application, developing an efficient and user-friendly method for segmenting CT data continues to be a formidable challenge in the fi...

3D visualization and segmentation are increasingly widely used in physical, biological and medical science, facilitating advanced investigative methodologies. However, the integration and reproduction of segmented volumes or results across the spectrum of mainstream 3D visualization platforms remain hindered by compatibility constraints. These barr...

Acroporidae and Pocilloporidae are the predominant reef-building corals of Indo-Pacific coral reefs. Coral colony is the basic geometric construction of coral reef, while sustained formation of their calcium carbonate skeletons is the heart of healthy reefs. However, the reef forming strategies in coral growth is still obscure. In this study, we re...

When first described based on isolated scales, Ligulalepis was assigned to the Palaeoniscoidea, a basal group of actinopterygians (ray-finned fishes). Recent cladistic analyses, mainly based on skull and neurocranial characters, have mostly recovered the taxon (or, ‘ Ligulalepis ’) as a stem osteichthyan. Here we present information on Ligulalepis...

The pelvic morphology, and whether the pelvic fin is present or absent in the earliest jawed vertebrates are key in interpreting the origin of vertebrate paired fins. Parayunnanolepis xitunensis, an antiarch placoderm from the Early Devonian of Yunnan, South China, was previously described to possess the earliest evidence of both dermal and endoske...

Vayu 1.0 is a freeware that deals with surface mesh files. It provides a set of tools for rendering, labelling, revisualizing, and reanalyzing meshes. It also offers features for VR mode and one-stop animation production. This paper describes the major features of Vayu 1.0, which includes three main panels, i.e. mesh information, keyframe editor, a...

Molecular studies suggest that the origin of jawed vertebrates was no later than the Late Ordovician period (around 450 million years ago (Ma))1,2. Together with disarticulated micro-remains of putative chondrichthyans from the Ordovician and early Silurian period3–8, these analyses suggest an evolutionary proliferation of jawed vertebrates before,...

Background The megalichthyids are one of several clades of extinct tetrapodomorph fish that lived throughout the Devonian–Permian periods. They are advanced “osteolepidid-grade” fishes that lived in freshwater swamp and lake environments, with some taxa growing to very large sizes. They bear cosmine-covered bones and a large premaxillary tusk that...

Colonies are the basic geometric building blocks of coral reefs. However, the forming regulations of both colonies and reefs are still not understood adequately. Therefore, in this study, we reconstructed 25 samples using high‐resolution micro‐computed tomography to investigate coral growth patterns and parameters. Our skeleton and canal reconstruc...

The Silurian Period occupies a pivotal stage in the unfolding of key evolutionary events, including the rise of jawed vertebrates. However, the understanding of this early diversification is often hampered by the patchy nature of the Silurian fossil record, with the articulated specimens of jawed vertebrates only known in isolated localities, most...

Colony is the basic geometric construction of coral reef. However, both the forming regulations of colony and reef are still obscure. In this study, we reconstructed 21 important samples by high-resolution micro-computed tomography to investigate coral growth pattern and parameter. Our skeleton and canal reconstructions revealed characteristics of...

The recent finding of a fossil entombed in a Late Cretaceous amber-Oculudentavis khaungraae-was claimed to represent a humming bird-sized dinosaur. Regardless of the intriguing evolutionary hypotheses about the bauplan of Mesozoic dinosaurs (including birds) posited therein, this enigmatic animal demonstrates various morphologies resembling lizards...

Iodine‐based contrasting agents for computed tomography (CT) have been used for decades in medicine. Agents like Lugol's iodine enhance the contrasts between soft tissues and mineralized (skeletal) tissues. Because a recent study on extant avian heads showed that iodine–ethanol (I2E) is a better contrast enhancer overall than the standard Lugol's i...

Our understanding of the earliest evolution of jawed vertebrates depends on a credible phylogenetic framework for the jawed stem gnathostomes collectively known as “placoderms”.¹ However, their relationships, and whether placoderms represent a single radiation or a paraphyletic array, remain contentious.2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 This u...

The Silurian Period occupies a pivotal stage in the unfolding of key evolutionary events, including the rise of jawed vertebrates [1-4]. However, the understanding of this early diversification is often hampered by the patchy nature of the Silurian fossil record [5], with the articulated specimens of jawed vertebrates only known in isolated localit...

Computed tomography (CT) has become very widely used in scientific and medical research and industry for its non-destructive and high-resolution means of detecting internal structure. Three-dimensional segmentation of computed tomography data sheds light on internal features of target objects. Three-dimensional segmentation of CT data is supported...

Middle Palaeozoic vertebrate fossil occurrences are summarised for Australia, with reference to faunal connections between Asia and East Gondwana, as first indicated by fish distributions of Lower Devonian fossil sites. Major endemic groups discussed are pituriaspid (Australian) and galeaspid (Asian) agnathans, wuttagoonaspids (Australian) and anta...

Our understanding of the earliest evolution of jawed vertebrates depends on a credible phylogenetic assessment of the jawed stem gnathostomes collectively known as ‘placoderms’. However, their relationships, and even whether ‘placoderms’ represent a single radiation or a paraphyletic array, remain contentious. Here we describe the endocranial cavit...

3D scientific visualization is a popular non-destructive investigation tool, however current imaging processing and 3D visualization software has compatibility barriers which make replicability and reproducibility in research difficult. To solve this, we developed a new revisualization method and demonstrated four case studies using three mainstrea...

Computational tomography is more and more widely used in many fields for its non-destructive and high-resolution in detecting internal structures of the samples. 3D segmentation of computed tomography data, which sheds light into internal features of target objects, is increasingly gaining in importance. However, how to efficiently and precisely re...

Coral reefs are formed by living polyps, and understanding the dynamic processes behind the reefs is crucial for marine ecosystem restoration. However, these processes are still unclear because the growth and budding patterns of living polyps are poorly known. Here, we investigate the growth pattern of a widely distributed reef-building coral Pocil...

Recent finding of a fossil, Oculudentavis khaungraae Xing et al. 2020, entombed in a Late Cretaceous amber was claimed to represent a humming bird-sized dinosaur [1]. Regardless the intriguing evolutional hypotheses about the bauplan of Mesozoic dinosaurs (including birds) posited therein, this enigmatic animal, however, demonstrates various lizard...

Our understanding of the earliest evolution of jawed vertebrates depends on a credible phylogenetic framework for the jawed stem gnathostomes collectively known as "placoderms".(1) However, their relationships, and whether placoderms represent a single radiation or a paraphyletic array, remain contentious.(2-13) This uncertainty is compounded by an...

Silurolepis platydorsalis, a Silurian jawed vertebrate originally identified as an antiarch, is here redescribed as a maxillate placoderm close to Qilinyu, and is anteroposteriorly reversed as opposed to the original description. The cuboid trunk shield possesses three longitudinal cristae, obstanic grooves on the trunk shield, and three median dor...

Edenopteron, with a lower jaw some 48 cm long, and total length perhaps exceeding 3 m, is the largest Devonian lobe-fin known from semi-articulated remains. New material described from the type locality (Boyds Tower, south of Eden) includes three slightly smaller articulated skulls and jaws, and additional bones of the shoulder girdle. Another arti...

Rhipidistians comprise dipnomorphs (the lungfish lineage) and tetrapodomorphs (the tetrapod lineage). Arquatichthys porosus Lu and Zhu, 2008 is a Pragian dipnomorph from the Posongchong Formation of Zhaotong, Yunnan, South China (∼409 million years ago, Early Devonian), previously represented by a lower jaw and few scattered scales. Here we describ...

The tetrapodomorph fish, Gogonasus andrewsae is a three dimensionally well-preserved sarcopterygian from the Gogo Formation (Frasnian, early Upper Devonian, ~380 million years ago) in Western Australia. High-resolution X-ray Micro-Computed Tomography and 3D printouts were used to obtain a digital reconstruction of its shoulder girdle and opercular...

Cloud storage security has been widely focused by the industry and academia in recent years. Differing from the previous researches on cloud data integrity audit, we pay more attention to the security of log generated during the operation of cloud data. While cloud data is damaged and tampered by various security threats (e.g. faulty operations, ha...

This paper presents a novel methodology to detect the steganography on the fixed codebook (FCB) of adaptive multi-rate (AMR) speech stream. We have found that correlations of pulses are influenced by the steganographic operation. Based on this, two categories of features are proposed to characterize the pulse correlations, namely subframe-level pul...

Exploiting the fact that the pitch period parameter in speech parameter encoding is difficult to predict, a large number of steganographic strategies choose to embed secret information in the pitch period. Several detection methods for these steganography strategies based on the pitch period have also been proposed so far, but it is still a challen...

Here the posterior cranial portion of the tetrapodomorph Tungsenia from the Lower Devonian (Pragian, ~409 million years ago) of Yunnan, southwest China, is reported for the first time. The pattern of posterior skull roof and the morphology of the otoccipital region of the neurocranium are described in detail, providing precious insight into the com...

Although a large number of steganography algorithms based on algebraic-code-excited-linear-prediction have been proposed, their performance, such as embedding capacity, embedding transparency and capability for resisting detection, can be further enhanced. Therefore, we are motivated to present a new steganographic scheme based on pitch delay searc...

The study of early actinopterygians (ray‐finned fishes) from the Devonian has been hampered by imperfect preservation in the majority of taxa. The Late Devonian (early Frasnian) Gogo Formation of north‐western Western Australia is notable in producing complete fossil actinopterygians with exceptional three‐dimensional preservation of both the derma...

With increasing popularity of fog-to-cloud based Internet of Things (IoT), how to ensure the integrity of IoT data outsourced in clouds has become one of the biggest security challenges. However, little effort has been put into addressing the problem. To fill this gap, this paper presents a tailor-made public auditing scheme for data storage in fog...

Arthodire placoderms, as a possible sister group of Chinese ‘maxillate’ placoderms plus crown gnathostomes, provide important information regarding early evolution of jaws and teeth. High-resolution computed tomography and digital dissection on a unique articulated 400 million-year-old buchanosteid arthrodire permitsa detailed description of the th...

Cloud auditing is a significant technique for determining the security of data owners’ data in cloud. However, multiple-replica places greater demands on cloud auditing, where not only the integrity of each data replica but also the number of replicas should be checked. Moreover, it is also significant to support dynamical updating for multiple-rep...

As an indispensable branch of cloud computing, cloud storage enables individuals and organizations to enjoy large-scale and distributed storage capability in a multi-tenant service pattern. However, there is still a serious lack of mutual trust between the users and cloud service providers, since both of them can perform dishonest and malicious ope...

Here the posterior cranial portion of the tetrapodomorph Tungsenia from the Lower Devonian (Pragian, ~409 million years ago) of Yunnan, southwest China, is reported for the first time. The pattern of posterior skull roof and the morphology of the otoccipital region of the neurocranium are described in detail, providing precious insight into the com...

Here the posterior cranial portion of the tetrapodomorph Tungsenia from the Lower Devonian (Pragian, ~409 million years ago) of Yunnan, southwest China, is reported for the first time. The pattern of posterior skull roof and the morphology of the otoccipital region of the neurocranium are described in detail, providing precious insight into the com...

Cloud storage, one of the core services of cloud computing, provides an effective way to solve the problems of storage and management caused by high-speed data growth. Thus, a growing number of organizations and individuals tend to store their data in the cloud. However, due to the separation of data ownership and management, it is difficult for us...

Arthodire placoderms have been proposed as the sister group of Chinese ‘maxillate’ placoderms plus all the more crownward gnathostomes. These basal groups provide key information for understanding the early evolution of jaws. Here, we test previous assumptions about placoderm jaw structure and function by using high-resolution computed tomography,...

Osteichthyans (bony fishes and tetrapods) form the trunk of vertebrate evolutionary tree. Two osteichthyan clades, namely sarcopterygians (lobe-finned fishes and tetrapods) and actinopterygians (ray-finned fishes), conquer the lands and waters of modern earth respectively. The lobe-finned fishes gave rise to the tetrapods that include all the terre...

Jaws from the jawless Until a fossil called Entelognathus was found to contain a tripartite jaw a few years ago, it was believed that the skeletons of early osteichthyans (bony fish), the ancestors of all vertebrates, were derived independently of those of the earlier placoderms (so-called jawless fish). Zhu et al. now describe a second Silurian pl...

Quantization index modulation (QIM) is a commonly used steganography method exploiting redundancy in codebook quantization procedure of signal encoding. The feasibility of steganography based on QIM depends on codebook division algorithm which mainly determines embedding capacity, latency and complexity of embedding and extracting algorithm. A nove...

In this paper, we present a distributed steganalysis scheme for compressed speech in voice-over-IP scenarios to provide fast and precise detection results. In this scheme, each speech parameter available for concealing information is designed to be detected independently exploiting the corresponding optimal detection feature. To achieve this purpos...

The Onychodontiformes is an enigmatic Devonian group of sarcopterygians characterized by large, sigmoid parasymphysial tooth whorls, and its monophyly is generally agreed. However, whether the Onychodontiformes is positioned among stem sarcopterygians or among crown sarcopterygians is still debated, partially due to the paucity of data on onychodon...

The gnathostome (jawed vertebrate) crown group comprises two extant clades with contrasting character complements. Notably, Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish) lack the large dermal bones that characterize Osteichthyes (bony fish and tetrapods). The polarities of these differences, and the morphology of the last common ancestor of crown gnathostome...

Coelacanths are known for their evolutionary conservatism, and the body plan seen in Latimeria can be traced to late Middle Devonian Diplocercides, Holopterygius and presumably Euporosteus. However, the group's early history is unclear because of an incomplete fossil record. Until now, the only Early Devonian coelacanth is an isolated dentary (Eoac...

Background: The pectoral and pelvic girdles support paired fins and limbs, and have transformed significantly in the diversification of gnathostomes or jawed vertebrates (including osteichthyans, chondrichthyans, acanthodians and placoderms). For instance, changes in the pectoral and pelvic girdles accompanied the transition of fins to limbs as so...

With the increasing popularity of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), VoIP-based steganography has become a new hot research topic. In this paper, we mainly focus on a public VoIP system, MSN voice (i.e. the VoIP of Windows Live Messenger), as a carrier to apply steganography to achieve covert communications. Differing from payload-based steganogr...

Steganography over real-time streaming media is a novel and promising research subject. This paper performs steganography over a typical streaming media, Voice over IP (VoIP), and suggests a new covert communication scheme for interactive secret messages. To resist the statistical detection, a sophisticated compounded pseudorandom sequence, produce...

177 neosuchian origins and highly unusual palatal conditions, the cranial osteology of a gonio-pholidid has not been fully described. A well-preserved, complete skull of the North American goniopholidid Eutretauranosuchus (AMNH 570) is described. The skull was subjected to CT scans, which revealed a well-preserved palate and braincase. As in Calsoy...

The evolutionary history of osteichthyans (bony fishes plus tetrapods) extends back to the Ludlow epoch of the Silurian period. However, these Silurian forms have been documented exclusively by fragmentary fossils. Here we report the discovery of an exceptionally preserved primitive fish from the Ludlow of Yunnan, China, that represents the oldest...

A new basal dipnomorph sarcopterygian, Arquatichthys porosus gen. et sp. nov., from the Lower Devonian (Pragian) of northeastern Yunnan, China, is described on the basis of a nearly complete mandible and several isolated scales. It closely resembles basal dipnomorphs in following characters: short and L-shaped pit-line of infradentary 4 (uniquely s...

A new basal dipnomorph sarcopterygian, Arquatichthys porosus gen. et sp. nov., from the Lower Devonian (Pragian) of northeastern Yunnan, China, is described on the basis of a nearly complete mandible and several isolated scales. It closely resembles basal dipnomorphs in following characters: short and L-shaped pit-line of infradentary 4 (uniquely s...