The Drawers Still Closed

Dendrocrinus simcoensis — Late Ordovician Neuville Lagerstätte, Québec.

Tube feet preserved as pyrite films on the arms, pinhead size. Second known soft-tissue crinoid in the whole hard record, oldest by more than two hundred million years.

The slab had been years in Montréal’s Musée de paléontologie et de l’évolution, catalogued ordinary, until a student said those projections should not be there.

Length and spacing together do not match any living stalked set. They infer the arms may have stood multidirectional or conical — food from more than one way — so a century of feeding analogy from modern relatives does not sit cleanly.

One in a million is a late mouth. Window into is a late mouth. Looking if you stay with the pyrite and the drawer that held it ordinary.

Pinheads already has the soft bits that held. The leftover is both: the soft bits that held on the arms, and the millions of columns that never kept them — and the drawers still closed.

Not Capotauro’s empty trail inverted. Something new on this slab: the living set that no longer sits as the measure.