This week’s fossil appeared previously in this blog when we discussed hiatus concretions and their fossil fauna. It is one of my favorites for both how we found it (see the entry linked above) and the way it introduced me to hard substrate fossils (it was my first). The edrioasteroid is the circular fossil in the center. Above it is a branching cyclostome bryozoan that will be the subject of another story someday. These fossils were found in the Kope Formation (Cincinnatian Group) of the Upper Ordovician in northern Kentucky, making them about 450 million years old.
Edrioasteroids (“seated stars”) were echinoderms (spiny-skinned animals) that lived from the Cambrian through the Permian periods (Sumrall, 2009). Their living relatives today include sea stars, sea urchins, sand dollars and crinoids. Edrioasteroids have a flattened disk-like body called a theca covered with plates of calcite. They attached themselves to hard substrates like shells, hardgrounds or cobbles (as in the photo above). On the upper surface of the theca are ambulacra extending outward from a central mouth. The anus is a little circular set of plates between two of the ambulacra. The ambulacra themselves had tiny little tube feet that extended upwards into the seawater for filter-feeding suspended organic matter.
The fossil above, also represented in the diagram below, is Cystaster stellatus (Hall, 1866). It is a small edrioasteroid, as the group goes, and is characterized by straight, wide ambulacra.
(Image from the Cincinnati Dry Dredgers’ wonderful website.)
(Image from the public domain Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition.)
Edrioasteroids are favorite fossils for collectors. I learned this when I published a paper on the fauna that included the fossils above (Wilson, 1985) and later the outcrop was pillaged — not a single edrioasteroid remains there from the hundreds originally found.
References:
Sumrall, C.D. 2009. First definite record of Permian edrioasteroids; Neoisorophusella maslennikovi n. sp. from the Kungurian of northeast Russia. Journal of Paleontology 83: 990-993.
Wilson, M.A. 1985. Disturbance and ecologic succession in an Upper Ordovician cobble-dwelling hardground fauna. Science 228: 575-577.
I wonder what motivates the collectors. Do they want to study it up close? Admire it as a marvel or from an aesthetic perspective? Share the wonder with their social network? Or is it ownership — they want to incorporate it into their personal collections, using their own little tube feet to gather it in?
Most collectors by far are motivated by the sheer beauty and elegance of fossils, and they collect with respect for both science and nature. A few, though, simply ransack outcrops for profit. I saw many edrioasteroids from this site cut from the cobbles and for sale individually from a science supply house.