Post by Joe Botting on Oct 5, 2006 15:17:09 GMT -5
Class of echinoderms, that is. It's been months since the last one, so I suppose, so it's only fair...
I thought the next echinoderm class to turn up would be ophiuroids (brittle stars) because that's the only notable absence from the groups that you might expect at this time. It's not, though. It's an eocrinoid. Or, more precisely, two of them, and they appear to be rather different species.
One of them is a bit like this sort of thing:
drydredgers.org/billwhite01b.htm
but the other is more difficult. It's superimposed on a trilobite bit, and might actually have been attached to it in life. Possibly. But we'll probably never know.
They're both from the same locality in the gracilis Zone, making them, as far as I'm aware, the youngest known eocrinoids, with the exception of a weird one from the Silurian. I may be wrong on this, though, since we haven't gone into the literature properly yet. It's safe to say that most of them are Early Cambrian to Early Ordovician, though.
All good fun. Oh, and a strange carpoid-y thing as well, from the same place. And another bit of the echinoid too - possibly a fragment of the same partial specimen as we already have, but nice bits of ambulacrum are visible, if you're interested. We'll describe it all some time.
Cheers,
Joe
I thought the next echinoderm class to turn up would be ophiuroids (brittle stars) because that's the only notable absence from the groups that you might expect at this time. It's not, though. It's an eocrinoid. Or, more precisely, two of them, and they appear to be rather different species.
One of them is a bit like this sort of thing:
drydredgers.org/billwhite01b.htm
but the other is more difficult. It's superimposed on a trilobite bit, and might actually have been attached to it in life. Possibly. But we'll probably never know.
They're both from the same locality in the gracilis Zone, making them, as far as I'm aware, the youngest known eocrinoids, with the exception of a weird one from the Silurian. I may be wrong on this, though, since we haven't gone into the literature properly yet. It's safe to say that most of them are Early Cambrian to Early Ordovician, though.
All good fun. Oh, and a strange carpoid-y thing as well, from the same place. And another bit of the echinoid too - possibly a fragment of the same partial specimen as we already have, but nice bits of ambulacrum are visible, if you're interested. We'll describe it all some time.
Cheers,
Joe
