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These Jurassic Sea Creatures Spent Decades Crossing The Ocean on Rafts. Here's How - ScienceAlert
Aug 11, 2020 1 min, 12 secs

Buckland noticed that these crinoid fossils were attached to small pieces of driftwood we call lenses, which had turned into coal.

He hypothesised that the crinoids had been attached to the driftwood while alive, and perhaps for their entire lives, possibly living suspended underneath it.

Modern crinoids don't typically take such journeys, but we've since discovered fossilised examples of groups of floating crinoids.

Now my colleagues and I have shown that such rafts could last for as long as 20 years, plenty of time for crinoids to grow to maturity and become full-time ocean sailors.

One of the key parts of the original theory was that any floating colony of crinoids would have grown until the population became too heavy for the wood raft to support it.

The wood in crinoid raft fossils hasn't been preserved well enough for us to know what species it comes from.

We found that the floating wood and its crinoid cargo would have been able to last for at least 15 years and maybe up to 20 years before the log would begin to sink or break up.

There is evidence from museum collections of fragments of wood with entire, fully grown crinoids attached to them that could only have resulted from this kind of collapse.

This research has now put beyond doubt that crinoid raft colonies could exist and survive for many years to grow to maturity and travel the vast distances across the Jurassic oceans.

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