criniod stem

what exactly is a criniod stem?
We have found several of these and know this
is what they are called but do not know what
it is.

I have been wondering the same thing. I hear the others here talking about them but upon researching them I didn't exactly get the answer of what it is. It is something that grows in the ocean and is a sea animal, but I don't know exactly what makes a sea animal a sea animal or an animal an animal. There are things that metamorph and trying to decipher the exact definition is hard. There's probably some that are somewhere between fish and animals and also some that are somewhere between plant and animals. and it really comes down to someone studying it and giving it a classification based on their studies, sort of an opinion. Science is studying a few that were classified wrong, and I am not sure what they did about them. Pluto is still a planet in my mind no matter who tries to reclassify it. cities or townships change names of roads that you live on to a new name and never ask the people living on the road what they think. There isn't even a road with the same name that causes interference with directions, someone just wants to rename it. changing things only causes confusion a lot of times and doesn't really need to be done.

A crinoid was a small marine animal in the echinoderm class. Sometimes they`re called a sea lilly or feather star. It anchored itself to the sea floor with a single stem topped off by a mop looking bloom of sorts. The cup or calyx topped off the stem and held small mop like projections that captured the food from the plankton in the water. Something like coral do. There are still living crinoids but they do not resemble those of ancient days. The stems are sometimes found just as small discs that have seperated or as a unit. And they also had a "float" which I`m not quite sure how it worked or what it did. But I did find one in my backyard preserved in Austin chalk and saw one at a local rock shop. They are not as common here in the south as they are farther north of us.