Saline lakes of continental environments host many giant oil and gas fields. However, the biologies within these environments have not been well constrained due to the complexity and speciality, which are important scientific issues in the fields of petroleum geochemistry and lacustrine sedimentology. To better understand these issues, this paper reviews the development characteristics of biology in saline lacustrine facies and discusses their implications for hydrocarbon source. Results show that the salinelakes are not the traditionallythought “biological deserts”. Instead, along with the increase of salinity, biological species decrease but the biomass does not reduce, and thus saline lakes can have high productivities, further forming highquality hydrocarbon source rocks. Composition of the biological system in saline lakes is rather complex, including higher plants, algae, hypoxia photosynthetic bacteria, anaerobic autotrophic bacteria, vertebrates, invertebrates, and archaea. Moreover, the organisms in saline lakes are not uniform but hierarchically distributed, and salt tolerances of species are different. Biomarkers and their quantitative relationships of saline lacustrineorganisms have implications for the environments. The change of the organisms and the salinity influence the production, destruction and dilution related to the abundance of organic matter in source rocks, which further hasgeological significance on petroleum formation. In the future, there are still many scientific issues to be further studied, such as the species and quantity of saline lacustrine organisms, the proportion of contribution to hydrocarbon generation for each species, the influencing mechanisms of the amount of biological production, destruction and dilution, hydrocarbon generation model and mechanism, and the formation mechanism of saline lakes.