• clif@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I ALWAYS forget the name of these little guys even though I see them pretty frequently. Thank you for the reminder… I’ll try to commit it to memory this time (no promises)

    • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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      3 months ago

      It’s certainly not a spiral thread, but individual rings, which aren’t even uniform enough if they were a thread of a bolt or a screw.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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        3 months ago

        There is no question in my mind that it’s a crinoid. I grew up in a town in Southern Indiana that was essentially a giant crinoid bed in the Cambrian. I had so many pieces of crinoid. I even had a “flower,” which were really hard to find. Sadly, I lost it.

        Here’s a bunch of “stems”:

        Here’s a “flower”:

        I put those words in quotes, because a crinoid is actually an animal, not a plant. Here’s a sea lily, one of its modern descendents.