New research alters scientific understanding of sea lillies

Scientific research about sea lillies has been misdirected for more than 170 years, a new study in the Journal of Paleontology revealed.

Not to worry too much about that, though. Sea lillies, which are animals, not plants, have been around for 480 million years, and they’re not going anywhere. Scientists just now understand them and how they developed.

The biggest relevation is understanding how the sea creatures, which are anchored to the sea floor, developed their long arms.

“These early fossils provide new key evidence showing that what we had thought about the origin of sea lilies since 1846 is wrong,” said Tom Guensburg, the paper’s lead author and a research associate at the Field Museum in Chicago. “It’s not very often that we’re challenging ideas that are almost 200 years old.”

The oceanic beings, whose scientific name is crinoids, resemble flowers, with stalks that hold them to the floor while their small hands capture tiny plankton to feed on.

Guensburg said many people who have seen them consider sea lillies to be beautiful. They are purple, green and bright red. But while they appear to be flowers adorning the bottom of the sea, they are actually manimals with a nervous system and digestive system.

The paper describes a sea lilly fossil that scientists named Athenacrinus broweri in honor of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom.

The mistake dates back to 1846, when scientists linked an extinct group of creatures named cystoids with the sea lillies, as well as starfish, sand dollars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers and numerous extinct animals. Both had slender arms and did resemble each other.

The new study has proven that false.

“These new fossils provide for the first time an accurate picture of what the earliest crinoid arms were like, and they are unlike any cystoid in important ways,” Guensburg said. "No cystoid has such anatomy. One of the most fascinating branches of the tree of life, echinoderms, needs rearranging. That’s a big deal.”