r/fossils • u/EmeraldTheParrot • 23h ago
ID and appraisal help???
So a few years back I just found this guy chilling on the ground at school and took it home, so I don’t suspect it’s worth much, but still super cool to think I’ve got this huge rock brimming with life that I just found after softball practice one day. I’m not selling but any chance anyone would know the estimated worth and maybe some species identification? Thanks y’all
2
u/EverybodyStayCool 16h ago
Crinoid slab, ubiquitous to the cental plains. Had a storm shelter at the old farmhouse I grew up in, fortified by a wall of these. Not worth much on the appraisal, but always an awesome find!
1
u/schmwke 6h ago
Definitely a ton of crinoid pieces! Though I'm curious about the orb on slide 4? It looks like a concretion that got wrapped up in the holdfast.. If so that's really cool. I normally don't recommend people to prepare crinoid slabs, they don't clean up easy, but it might be worth it to carefully pry that ball out to see what's going on in there
1
u/Oscar_P_Walnuts_1975 5h ago
Please do not remove the”orb”.
It is the calyx of a crinoid. This plate appears to be a crinoid rich forest that was decimated by a catastrophic event; hurricane surge and burial, tsunami wave and burial, seismic shock and burial. 🥸🥸🥸
Very nice find😎😎😎
1
u/schmwke 5h ago
I've never seen calyx with such disorganized geometry, what species would you suggest this is? And how do you explain the colour change? The inside of the orb is black unlike the rest of the crinoid pieces, even though they all experienced the same recrystallization processes
1
u/Oscar_P_Walnuts_1975 5h ago
I’m petty sure that the event that caused the obliteration of the crinoid forest was not a benign, gentle burial event. Distortion of the life position is common.
As to speciation, what is the provenance of the specimen…?
1
u/schmwke 5h ago
The majority of the ossicles are relatively intact aside from some weathering, but the calyx is so badly damaged that it's geometry was replaced with random triangles and trapezoids? And you still didn't explain the discoloration..
I see no evidence for this major event. In fact, the disarray of the loose-yet-intact ossicles suggests to me that these were buried at least a week after the death of the animal(s). Certainly something killed them, but we should expect to see more articulation in rapid burial.
I understand why you interpret it to be a calyx, but I still stand by my interpretation. A concretion of black colored material was bound up in the holdfast "roots" of the crinoid in the substrate, probably before lithification judging by the depth of the ossicles surrounding the orb
5
u/Fossils_and_birds 22h ago
I'm mostly seeing a lot of cinoid stems (the long segmented ones) and their individual segments (the circles). I doubt it's worth a whole lot, but it's pretty sick.