Description
This is an excellent crinoid from the Mississippian Formation of Bangor County, Alabama. Here is your chance to own a classic fossil from a classic site.
This is a detailed crown. There is one exceptionally detailed echinoderm on this piece and the detail is truly exceptional. This was recently collected and just recently prepared. It displays exceptional detail in the arms and calyx. The arms are clearly visible and outstanding, and some of the pinnules are visible.
Here is a block with a unidentified Alabama Crinoid Fossil crown. It is from a classic site in Franklin County, Alabama. The Crinoid deposits are known around the world.
Fossils especially this Unidentified Alabama Crinoid Fossil from this site are preserved in Spectacular detail. Because of the large number and variety of these Crinoids it is also assumed they lived in dense communities.
This is actually an animal related to modern day starfish so they are echinoderms. They have modern relatives called crinoids that live in the deep oceans today. So then they lived in shallow salt water seas and lagoons.
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 which filtered food from the water.
Crinoids thrived in the warm shallow inland sea that covered the area during the Mississippian Period. These are generally found in the shale sediments around the world. Because the bedrock is so hard it takes painstaking work to prepare them. The crinoids were established near an ocean delta system that periodically buried the colonies in silt. This silt eventually hardened into stone that preserved the crinoids in glorious detail.
This Alabama Crinoid fossil has exceptionally detailed arms. The crinoid is 1 1/4 inches long and sits on a roughly square matrix 3 by 2 3/4. It has been meticulously prepared using air abrasive technology.
