Sea lilies, Yunnan–Guizhou, China
Sea lily
Traumatocrinus guanlingensis
A large open fan of Traumatocrinus on a single slab — the showpiece of the series.
500 000 ₽ · By order
- Epoch
- Triassic period
- Age
- ≈ 235 Mya
- Origin
- Yunnan–Guizhou, China
- Classification
- Echinoderms, sea lilies; Traumatocrinus guanlingensis
- Habitat
- Warm Triassic seas; colonies drifted on floating wood
- Ref.
- R–0231
This Traumatocrinus slab immediately carries a ceremonial sense of scale: the open crown holds the centre of the composition like a great fan against the calm ground of the stone. It has a theatricality rare in fossils — not a scatter of details, but a single complete gesture preserved from a Triassic sea some 235 million years ago.
A sea lily only looks like a plant. It is an animal, a relative of starfish and urchins: the fan of pinnate arms opened in the water column and strained it for plankton, while the segmented stem held the crown to the drifting wood. When the tree sank, the colony settled to the bottom and was buried in fine mud — thus arose the slabs of the Guanling biota, to which this specimen belongs.
Burial in mud preserved these animals with rare completeness: crowns, pinnate arms and stems lie in the rock in relief, like a herbarium assembled by geology itself. Each slab is one scene of that catastrophe and one composition, never repeated twice.
Sea lilies of this genus vanished together with their world, yet their elegance has not aged in a quarter of a billion years. A slab of Traumatocrinus preserves the colony in its life position — just as it drifted on its trunk.