Isolated Ideas: Crinoid Literature of the Sixteenth Century

The first published accounts of the class Crinoidea (phylum Echinodermata) were from the latter half of the sixteenth century, during which seven or eight works were published. Because this was long before the establishment of modern systematic nomenclature by Linnaeus in 1758, this literature has been largely ignored. The first published work on crinoids was by Agricola in 1546, and the first illustrations of crinoids were by Gessner in 1565-1566. Crinoids were mentioned in these early publications as descriptions of objects dug from the earth, objects that had medicinal uses, and description of collections. The perceived medicinal use of fossil crinoids may have been an important factor for the attention that they received in sixteenth century publications. Little continuity existed from one author to the next, despite communications and mentor-student relationships. During this century, living and fossil crinoids were not allied, neither one was correctly interpreted with living comatulid crinoids (considered starfish), and fossil crinoid columnals were considered inanimate objects. At the close of the sixteenth century, circular and pentalobate columnals and pluricolumnals were related to one another even though they were categorized with an artificial classification scheme, the proposed name for pentalobate pluricolumnals is the valid name today for the Jurassic crinoid Pentacrinus, and living comatulid crinoids were regarded as echinoderms.