Tomasz K. Baumiller has published a video of a walking crinoid. It's in realtime, meaning the little critter is walking along at a fairly brisk pace (for a crinoid, that is). Despite their resemblance to flowers, crinoids are animals, belonging to the Echinodermata, to which starfish also belong. In fact, we're closer related to crinoids than we are to flies. Think about that the next time you try to swat a too-fast-to-catch fly.
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October 24th, 2005 at 10:56 am
My nine-year-old is utterly fascinated and is planning his crinoid research for the day. Thank you for posting this!
Comment by Amanda — October 24, 2005 @ 10:56 am
October 24th, 2005 at 2:38 pm
When I was about 5 years old we lived at the very edge of town. At the end of our paved city street was a gravel road that cut through the hummocky terrain exposing strata that are called the "Portland deposit." In my idyllic childhood explorations I discovered fossils in the reddish clayey substratum, beautifully preserved. The most common were shells but the most striking looked like plants. Which is what adults told me they were. Looting the local library I found out that they were animals. (And never trusted an adult again for the rest of my life. LOL) Crinoids. So began my lifelong fascination with evolution.
Excellent find, Krauze!
When I was exploring "teleology" I became very disappointed with the whole "philosophical" approach to the subject. Aristotle, who seems to have had the first and last word on the matter, left me cold. I found that design engineers had a less "philosophical" and more practical approach. But I also found that cognitive and developmental psychologists had done a lot of very interesting work on how children (naïve physicists, biologists, and engineers) distinguish between what is natural, biological, and technological. One basis is that the "object" appears to move in a self-directed way toward some evident "goal." See e.g., John Opfer's research, "Identifying living and sentient kinds from dynamic information: the case of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement in conceptual change," Cognition 86: 97-122.
I was taught that crinoids, even though they were animals, were sessile.
Comment by Rock — October 24, 2005 @ 2:38 pm