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Dec 17th, 2019 : Sea Lilly
For 100 years scientists have been arguing debating about the origins of the modern Sea Lilly.
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IN THE EARLY 1980S, TOM Guensberg was working as a geologist for Getty Oil, but he was thinking like a paleontologist. Getty had a private geological library, and one day, while poring over a geologic map of Utah, Guensberg spotted what could be a gold mine for fossil hunters. He’d noticed an area in the Great Basin with extensive swaths of ancient, fossil-studded rocks. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, only that he might find something extraordinary. “Of course, this was a gamble,” he says. “But it paid off.” Guensberg, who returned to academia and is now a research associate at the Field Museum in Chicago, has prospected the lands of the Great Basin in a series of visits from the 1980s until the present. On several of these trips, he collected specimens of crinoids, often called sea lilies, with unusual arms. Modern sea lilies resemble flowers fastened to the seafloor, crowned with a pinwheel of frilled arms, but researchers have never known exactly how the lilies evolved from earlier, armless echinoderms, a phylum that includes starfish, sea urchins, and sand dollars. Guensberg’s unusual specimens, which he deemed Athenacrinus broweri, helps solve that mystery, according to a recent paper in Cambridge University Press. |
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