Sea lilies, Yunnan–Guizhou, China
Sea lily
Traumatocrinus guanlingensis
An adult crown and, beside it, the small crowns of the same colony — a rare group subject.
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–0236
What matters here is not a single silhouette, but a scene: beside the mature crown are smaller ones, as if the whole colony had entered the stone at different ages. This group rhythm makes the slab especially alive — the eye moves from the large form to the smaller ones, and a sense emerges of the scale of an ancient community.
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.