 Amber Necklace |
 Gin Glass |
 Neck Ornament |
 Irish Lady's Tresses Orchid |
 The Lennox Quilt |
 Fossil Crinoids |
 Madonna and Child |
 A Red Alga |
 Irish Wolfhound |
 Coates Family Photograph |
 Chinese Ivory Puzzle Ball |
 Early Medieval Tomb-shaped Shrine |
 The Green Coat, Sir John Lavery |
 Juvenile Bald Eagle |
Fossil Crinoids - Traumatocrinus caudex
Gauihou, Ghizou Province, China
Purchased
Accession number: K29625
Flower-like fossils known as Crinoids or 'Sea Lilies', are animals related to starfish but with finely branched arms to filter plankton from sea water. Crinoids have been in existence for nearly 500 million years, with 600 different types living today, but few people other than divers ever encounter living crinoids. Most are, or were, sea-floor dwellers attached to mud or rocks, but these Chinese crinoids were very different. They were found in deep-sea mudstones, about 225 million years old (late Triassic Period), deposited where there was little or no oxygen - and so where crinoids could not have lived. So how did they get there?
These Chinese crinoids are nearly always found in large groups next to pieces of fossilized wood (now turned to a thin layer of coal) - it is this that holds the key! The crinoids did not live on the sea floor but were attached to driftwood floating at the surface. The crinoids grew larger and the driftwood became more waterlogged until, finally, the wood and crinoids sank to the sea floor to be preserved in the stagnant mud there.
Comment
Mike Simms, Curator of Palaeontology
I had a keen interest in fossil crinoids as a schoolboy and my first research paper, published in 1986, was about fossil crinoids attached to wood in Jurassic rocks, 195 million years old. These Chinese crinoids are not closely related to the Jurassic examples that I worked on, and only in the last decade has it been realized that they too had evolved to live a precarious existence attached to driftwood. This particular specimen is rather special because it shows the crinoids actually attached to a piece of driftwood.
