These are incredible specimens, it’s quite common to find the little discs that make up the column. I’ve never seen fossilised Crinoids as intact as these before.
Whooa. I find those little cylinders/discs all the time at a local river. Knew they were called crinoids. But never knew what a crinoid actually was. Assumed it was some sort of plant or something. Insanely cool.
They actually still exist today!!! They're just more commonly called sea lilies - relatives of sea stars, sea cucumbers, and sea urchins, they're very fascinating creatures. Most fossil crinoids were thought to be immobile, but we now have video proof that they can pull themselves out of the substrate and either swim or drag themselves to a new spot.
We have a great unit called the Onondaga that has a ton of disarticulated crinoids for days. I would have loved to see something like this during my studies.
Look up the Crawfordsville Crinoids, they’re amazing! They’re all over that region of indiana, I have a fossilized crinoid calyx that I found from that area.
These are the calyces (plural of calyx) specifically. Not the entire organism. Crinoids also have a series of disc like ossicles that stack up to form a stalk. With these discs being the most common fossil of crinoids
Maybe we’ve been viewing the problem of life being a simulation (us being in the matrix) in the wrong order….
Maybe instead of finding out we are in it now and have to escape; the scenario is humanity already escaped in the past (these sentinel fossils support this version).
I used to think it was funny that the matrix determined the peak of humanity to be in the late 90s, but now having seen what came afterwards I actually agree with it.
It’s a nested simulation. We’re not in base reality, we escaped from one simulation to another. Which is actually a fan theory of the Matrix, that Zion and the “real world” is still just another layer.
If the machines will have us, maybe some of us should go back. It might be safer there.
Especially for queer/LGBT+ people, American Progressives, and minority POC.
Whatever causes the rich and the powerful to lose their empathy and become narcissistic jerks should’ve been contained by the SCP Foundation so we wouldn’t have to deal with this mess.
Crinoid. There are still some versions of them alive in spots in the ocean. OLD species. Have made it through many mass extinctions. Mostly all I’ve ever found is just the calyx or the stem stalk pieces, takes some skill to get the whole thing out of the rock like that (normally found in certain limestone formation if I’m remembering correctly).
Man this just triggered some ancient memory that I can't place exactly...but a character maybe in a movie or something just snarfing down a plate of these small octopi and it looked absolutely disgusting.
Not mine. They're around 160 million years old apparently. They became extinct even without our help. Darwins theory seems legit. We'll all be getting dug out of rocks in another 100 million years with whatever the next dominant intelligent life is that develops on our rock. I wonder if they'll still be knocking lumps out of each other and squabbling over resources and land?
I think it’ll be something that evolves from Orcas. I’ve seen reports of them attacking boats. They go for the same thing (the rudder) every time they do it. Which means they know that will disable the boat.
A captain whose boat had been attacked twice said the 2nd time they communicated much less, were much more organized, did a better job, and were even faster at doing it. This shows advanced problem solving intelligence.
Add to the fact their intelligence is already equivalent to a 16 year old, for reference an octopus is only as smart as a 3 year old. 100 million years later Orca intelligence could be on par with a 25 year old.
Until they develop an opposable thumb, they are of little threat. They could be 10x smarter, but if they cannot manipulate the world and make fire, they’re forever trapped aimlessly swimming around and eating sushi.
On the other hand, we could imagine evolutionary pressures trending towards higher intelligence to a point where a species could be much smarter than humans even with more limited physiology.
It's purely speculative but it's possible a species could arise which is intelligent enough to clear those hurdles even without prehensile limbs. The problem with intelligence is that we simply cannot predict what something 10x smarter than us would do. If we could predict that, then we'd be as smart as they are, which we aren't.
Humans can not allow another creature to be the apex predator of our planet. The orcas have not decided that humans need to be killed or are a prey species which is why so few people have ever been attacked by them.
Big cats and wolves were once the dominant predators but humans have evolved and developed tools to control them.
I think people seriously underestimate the value of having digits/hands. Tell me how Orcas are supposed to develop anything without efficient tool use? Maybe I'm just unimaginative, but that seems like it might even be the limiting factor for a break through like hominids had.
Orcas are smart, but the comparison with a 16 year old human is nonsensical. There are innumerable ways in which human intelligence outstrips that of any other mammal.
Nah, I think the corvids will take over after we are gone. They are actual descendants of dinosaurs and will likely outlive us because they are so adaptable. They thrive in so many biomes, create and use tools, teach their children and other members of their social groups, and have the vocal ability to develop oral language as complex as ours if they wanted to.
Octopus is incredibly intelligent and dexterous, but very short lived, not very social, and too fragile overall.
Orcas descended from animals that already tried life on land, which makes me think they are less likely to try evolving back out of the ocean again... though only time would tell.
It's a fun thought experiment, though, imagining what it would be like for either cetaceans or cephalopods to take our place.
Octopus are a personal favorite creature of mine (I have a tattoo of the Blue Ringed Octopus) but "not very social" is an understatement. Cephlapods are territorial, and not shy about resorting to cannibalism if need be. 💀
I mean, they are sea lillies (crinoids). And there are plenty of living species. They're animals, not plants - echinoderms, related to sea urchins and starfish.
They're generally anchored to a rock or free-floating, but IIRC there are some species that use their cirri (appendages used for anchoring) to "walk".
Echinoderms were my favourites on my palaeontology course, many moons ago - they're amazing creatures!
You know, it's not something I've thought about in a long time. I'd cross the road to see pretty much ANY fossil.
I mean that literally - in the early 2000s, I travelled down to London to see the first Natural History Museum exhibition of perfectly preserved bird fossils coming out of China.
When I got arrived, a public-transport strike had been scheduled. The walk from Kings Cross to South Kensington and back was (is) 15 miles, it was a hot summer's day, and I was navigating using an old-style A-Z paper map book (pre-smartphones).
It’s so hard to see fossils and do a good job of imagining the extra muscle and tissue they probably had on them. An elephants skeleton would lead you to believe it was a very different looking animal, and there’s tons of cases like that.
There's a bunch of images out there that reconstruct modern animals like dinosaurs are often imagined, with their skin shrink-wrapped to the bone and little to no fat. My personal favorite is this painting of swans by C.M. Kösemen.
Maybe in the case of endoskeletal creatures but these seem to be fossilized fairly close to what they would look like. I don’t know what muscle you’re thinking of that would be on a crinoid. Have you seen the modern ones? They’re called feathers for a reason lol
This is amazing ! I remember I used to want to be a paleontologist and but that was like 6 years ago I kind of forgot most of what I used to know.
If I had to guess I would say those appeared during Paleozoic eon and if I had to take a wild guess (this is more a gambler thing here it’s most likely wrong, will try to check information on them later and correct in an edit ) Silurian period.
Here is my favorite suspect however there’s a lot that I wanted to mention in different Paleozoic era, but I deleted my edit by accident 😅:
Jimbacrinus bostocki:
From Permian sadly I can’t put picture and I don’t want to lose my edit again..
The image shows a fossil plate of Jimbacrinus bostocki, an extinct crinoid species from the Permian period, approximately 280 million years ago. It was discovered in 1949 in Western Australia. Jimbacrinus crinoids lived on the Permian seafloor. They lived a rather sessile life tethered to the seafloor, filter feeding on any plankton that drifted by.
Key features of Jimbacrinus bostocki include:
Large, bumpy calyx containing major organs.
Feathery arms with pinnules used for filter-feeding.
Long, thick stalk for anchoring to the seafloor.
Tan-brown coloring.
Excellent preservation of feathery pinnules.
Crowns reaching up to 9 inches in length.
Lived on the Permian seafloor.
Related to starfish and sea cucumbers.
It's amazing to me that there seems to be almost nothing scifi authors can think up that isn't already a real thing on our planet. What an incredible place this is.
I highly recommend not letting any blood drip on to them. They look like they are just itching to reawaken and summon other much larger Eldritch Horrors.
they appear to have been dug up from under dirt on the ground right where you took that photo. the clues suggest that they came from that area. hope this helps 😀
Fossilized octopuses is actually an extraordinary and quite rare find, with some specimens dating back to over 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous period. These particular ones are called Enteroctopus bollshaitu and can be found from Lahinch, Ireland to Zhuhai, China.
I'm also not qualified and don't know what I'm talking about.
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u/EstablishmentReal156 23h ago
Crinoids apparently and WOW! *