Crossword-Solution: CRINOIDS 8 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 11

Look at the Crinoids, or stalked star-fishes, the “Lilies of living stone,” which swarmed in the ancient seas, in vast variety, and in such numbers that whole beds of limestone are composed of their disjointed fragments; but which have vanished out of our modern seas, we know not why, till, a few years since, almost the only known living species was the exquisite and rare Pentacrinus asteria, from deep water off the Windward Isles of the West Indies.

After all, some of these stalked star- fish are so like flowers, lilies especially, that they are called Encrinites; and the whole family is called Crinoids, or lily-like creatures, from the Greek work _krinon_, a lily; and as for corals and corallines, learned men, in spite of all their care and shrewdness, made mistake after mistake about them, which they had to correct again and again, till now, I trust, they have got at something very like the truth.

Different species of crinoids, or stone-lilies, are also common in the same rocks with corals; and, like them, must have enjoyed a firm bottom, where their base of attachment remained undisturbed for years (_c,_ Fig.

With the above are found no less than eleven genera of stone-lilies or crinoids, some of them, such as _ Cupressocrinites,_ distinct from any Carboniferous forms.

Crinoids are rare at the present time, but they grew in the greatest profusion in the warm Ordovician seas and for long ages thereafter.