Jamaican Cretaceous Crinoidea

Abstract

Jamaica has the best-known fauna of fossil crinoids of the Antillean islands. Two Cretaceous species have been reexamined on the basis of new material. Lower Cretaceous Apiocrinites sp., previously referred to Austinocrinus n. sp. and first documented from a short pluricolumnal, is now known from brachials and further fragments of column. This is the first millericrinid, and only the second non-isocrinid stalked crinoid, to be identified from the Jamaican and Antillean fossil record. Other ossicles may be derived from the cirri of a comatulid. Applinocrinus cretacea (Bather) is well known from the upper Senonian of England, North America and the West Indies, although Caribbean specimens have not been figured previously. Functional interpretations of the mode of life of Applinocrinus suggest that it was a benthic crinoid, presumably with arms. It lived embedded in the sediment.

Roveacrinida (Crinoidea,Articulata) from theSantonian–Maastrichtian (UpperCretaceous) ofEngland, theUS GulfCoast (Texas,Mississippi) and southernSweden

“…Although Donovan et al . () suggested that Applinocrinus was benthonic, a number of facts lead me to support a planktonic life habit for the genus. Firstly, the facies independence of the occurrences and very widespread distribution (see below) are inappropriate for a benthonic organism.…”

“…Although widely described as pelagic, controversy has attended their life habits, with one group of workers believing the group to be exclusively benthic (Milsom , ; Donovan et al . ). A consensus view is that they were predominantly pelagic, but some may have been benthic during part of their ontogeny (Hess ).…”

“…Donovan et al . () suggested that brachials could have been attached to the inner side of the median prominence on the radials, and that their apparent absence from beds containing A. cretaceus could have been a result of taphonomic current sorting. Jagt () and Hess & Messing () were wisely ambivalent on the subject.…”

Not all written in stone: interdisciplinary syntheses in echinoderm paleontology

“…Most of these papers are on echinoids (e.g., Donovan 1993bDonovan , 1993cDonovan , 1994bDonovan and Embden 1996;Dixon and Donovan 1998), but there have been significant works on crinoids and other more poorly represented taxa (e.g., Donovan et al 1993Donovan et al , 1996b. These papers are starting to shed light on some of the complicated biogeographic questions that arise in studies on the Neotropics (Donovan 1994a).…”

<p><strong>Crinoid diversity in the Upper Cretaceous Yezo Supergroup, Hokkaido, northern Japan*</strong></p>

“…These 'Late Cretaceous-type faunas' are dominated by taxa adapted to living in the soft substrate chalk seas of northern Europe and North Africa and have been subject to extensive and rigorous taxonomic studies both for the relatively deep-water Danish and north German chalks (Rasmussen 1961;Schmid 1975), and their more shallow-water counterparts (Jagt et al 1998;Jagt 1999). A similar treatment is also found in faunas from eastern Europe (see e.g., Salamon 2009) and North and Central America; specifically Kansas (Milsom et al 1994), Mississippi (Moore 1967), Texas (Peck 1943;Peck & Watkins 1972), Mexico (Rasmussen 1961) and Jamaica (Donovan et al 1996). Relatively few surveys have been conducted elsewhere with Klikushin (1982Klikushin ( , 1987 and Oji (1985) as notable exceptions.…”