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Venus flytrap-like creature found

Ozzy

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[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Cracked rock found in county turns out to be fossilized find

by JANET HEIM janeth@herald-mail.com

HANCOCK - Harry Sloan knows the area around his home is filled with unique rock formations. Sloan lives two miles outside of Hancock, near the bottom of Sideling Hill.

It still surprised him, though, when his 14-year-old son Adam accidentally dropped a rock - a speckled one that he found within 10 feet of their house - and found what looked like a fossilized remain of a small animal. At first look, Adam thought it was a fossil of a worm.

The Sloans e-mailed a photo they took of the cracked rock to a professor at the University of Maryland in College Park

Thomas Holtz Jr., a senior lecturer in vertebrate paleontology at the university, identified the fossil as that of a Crinostem, a small creature similar to a Venus flytrap, Sloan said. He added that Holtz said it was unusual to find a fossil of a Crinostem intact in the Hancock area, that most usually are embedded in rock.

Sloan said he learned through Holtz that the valley near their home on Stein Road runs to Virginia, and 250 million years ago was a sea.

Sloan said he would like to give the fossil to the Smithsonian Institution or to the Sideling Hill display so other people can enjoy it.

"It's pretty neat to find something that old and to see it," Sloan said.
http://www.herald-mail.com/?module....at=html
 
A what now? I think the article messed up the name, because I can't find squat on anything called a "crinostem". It sounds like they messed up the phrase "crinoid stem", referring to a group of echinoderms that look more like flowers than animals.

Mokele
 
Crinoid stem?  Crinoids are very common fossils and I've been in a stream in Kentucky where the gravel bottom was almost entirely pieces of crinoid stem with the occasional "head".  Even though fragments can be that common, complete fossils are pretty rare.  See http://tolweb.org/Crinoidea.  They're still around, but not with the same diversity as in the Paleozoic.  And they're about as similar to a VFT as we are.

Edit - I just noticed Mokele already solved it.
 
Mark.... it's only August. At least wait until March!
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Don't worry, I've got a good one waiting for you. Too bad April don't come twice a year.
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Crinoid stem? Crinoids are very common fossils and I've been in a stream in Kentucky where the gravel bottom was almost entirely pieces of crinoid stem with the occasional "head".
ha yay kentucky! are these crinoids the same as brachiopods? we have tons of them here! ever heard of falls of the ohio? that place has more fossils than anywhere ive ever seen! me and my brother even found a rare trilobite(but it was small).
Alex
 
Crinoids are related to sea anemones, I think. Brachiopods are clams and stuff.

-Ben
 
Glider: most of southwest Ohio rests on what's called the Cincinnati Arch, a huge crop of exposed limestone seabed from the Ordovician (440 mya, prior to vertebrates really taking over). As a result, in much of southwest OH you can find huge numbers of brachiopods, crinoids, bryozoans, and trilobites anywhere there's exposed rock.

Technically, crinoids are closely related to neither clams nor sea anenomes, but rather to starfish. Essentially, they're an upside-down starfish with a long "stem" growing out of their back which anchors them to the substrate. They're distinct from anenomes and other cnidarians by virtue of being deutrostomes (the first hole in embryonic development becomes the anus, while in most other invertebrates it becomes the mouth), having 3 embryonic cell layers (cnirdarians have only 2), lacking nematocysts, having "tube feet", and possessing a 'skeleton' of calcium disks.

Also, brachiopods aren't actually clams, but rather are lophoporates. I'll not go into *all* the details, but basically, a clam's plane of bilateral symmetry is between the two halves of the shell (in other words, if the opening of the clam is horizontal, what's on the left and right aren't the same, but what's on top and bottom are), while for brachiopods it's through the midline (the reverse: a bachipod with the opening oriented horizontally has the same stuff on left and right, but not top and bottom).

Mokele
 
I think I've met a few humans over the years who could be classified as deutrostomes.
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  • #10
In other news tonight, a man in an undisclosed location is in a pending lawsuit because apparently an outdoor garden of carnivorous plants consumed two neighbors dogs. We will keep you posted as we receive more information on this bizarre story..
 
  • #11
[b said:
Quote[/b] (lithopsman @ Aug. 26 2006,3:50)]In other news tonight, a man in an undisclosed location is in a pending lawsuit because apparently an outdoor garden of carnivorous plants consumed two neighbors dogs. We will keep you posted as we receive more information on this bizarre story..
Dude, where have you been, that's very old news. That must have happened 3 or 4 years ago.
 
  • #12
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]I think I've met a few humans over the years who could be classified as deutrostomes.

Actually, all humans, and indeed all vertebrates, are deuterostomes, with the first opening in the embryo becoming the anus. Aside from echnioderms (starfish, crinoids, urchins and sea cucumbers) and a few poorly known phyla like the Chaetognatha, everything else is a protostome (arthropods, worms, mollusks, all that).

Mokele
 
  • #13
Gotcha. There really is a word for everything I guess.
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Eh, who needs all these different levels of classification anyway... I say we just draw the line at that one and call it a day.
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  • #14
[b said:
Quote[/b] (Mokele @ Aug. 26 2006,9:19)]Actually, all humans, and indeed all vertebrates, are deuterostomes, with the first opening in the embryo becoming the anus.
Hehehe. I thought that was what he ment. All they do is spew s....um, uh.. never mind.....
 
  • #15
Can this be combined with the Pluto thread? I sense a convergence.
 
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