Crinoid slab

Different fossils can be found in different parts of the country. While The Children’s Museum paleontology staff has gone to Wyoming and South Dakota for dinosaurs, the area around Crawfordsville, Indiana, is famous for its fossil crinoids. Crinoids are an ancient marine fossil group that first appeared in the mid-Cambrian, more than 300 million years before dinosaurs appeared. According to fossilmuseum.net, the first recorded Crawfordsville crinoid collector was 9-year-old Horace Hovey, who searched along Sugar Creek in 1842. Since that time, the area has produced some of the largest and most varied Borden Delta crinoid fossils found anywhere.

 

This large block of Indiana limestone was collected by Robert Howell in 1979 and contains a remarkably diverse and well-preserved assemblage of invertebrate fossils. Most spectacular are the many crinoids that have been painstakingly prepared and freed from the rock matrix. Crinoids are quite common in the fossil record of Indiana; however, it is extremely rare to find specimens that are so complete—and even more unusual to find one slab with so many different genera and species of crinoids represented.

 

Although the crinoids are the most noticeable aspect of this piece, there are also many other preserved specimens, including sponges, coral, gastropods, an echinoid, and a brachiopod. The diverse forms of life that are represented in this fossil slab help to show the mosaic of life that was once the ancient sea floor of Indiana.