ABSTRACT
The tropical western Atlantic, particularly the Straits of Florida and adjacent waters, supports extensive, often dense assemblages of crinoids in deep water, including Comatilia iridometriformis, Coccometra hagenii (Comatulida), Democrinus spp. This chapter concentrates on E. parrae and C. decorus, which exhibit distinct distributional, morphological and postural differences related to suspension-feeding, and varying locally with topography and current flow. Analyses of coarse sediment fractions reveal identifiable small-scale compositional and taphonomic variations among local subhabitats. Crinoid columnals contribute up to 52% of the benthic skeletal component of sediment samples. The correlation of such morphological, distributional, sedimentological and taphonomic heterogeneity with local physical environmental variations suggests that similar variations in fossil assemblages may contribute to more accurate interpretations of topography, energy regime and paleocommunity structure in ancient sediments.
