Description
These are parts of a fossil animal called a Crinoid.
It is hard to obtain fossils like this because they tend to disarticulate upon death. This one is very dimension and 3-D.
Fossils especially these Fossil Crinoid arms from this site is preserved in Spectacular detail. Because of the wide variety and number of these Crinoids it is also assumed they lived in dense communities.
These Crinoid arms are the feeding structures for an animal that is related to modern day starfish so they are echinoderms. They have modern relatives also crinoids that live in the deep oceans today. So then they lived in shallow salt water seas and lagoons. They lived during the Paleozoic and were most prevalent during the Mississippian Period. This one is Silurian and from the Rochester Shale of New York.
Although there were many species of Crinoids, they shared a basic body styles consisting of a stem by which it anchored to the sea floor with a “holdfast”. A calyx which enclosed soft body tissues, and arms and pinnules which filtered food from the water.
These Fossil Crinoid arms show where the crinoid gathered it’s food. The small tube feet on the arms would catch the food but then pass it down to the mouth. They thrived in the warm shallow inland sea that covered the area during the Silurian Period. Because the crinoids living near what is now Rochester New York they were established near an ocean delta system that periodically buried the colonies in silt. However the silt eventually hardened into stone that preserved the crinoids in glorious detail.
The 3 Fossil arms have exceptional detail and looks great in 3-D relief. This fossil arms are 2 3/8 inches long at it’s longest. The block is irregularly shaped 4 by 2 inches. It has been meticulously prepared using air abrasive technology.
