Around 100 million years ago, the continent that is currently North America was two or three large islands and slicing through the space between these islands was a massive, shallow ocean called the Western Interior Seaway.

It stretched all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean.

At its deepest, this giant sea was just 900 meters deep.

For comparison, the deepest point in the Mediterranean Sea is 5000 meters deep.

It was warm, it was shallow.

There were rivers from all over the place dumping nutrients into this thing.

And today, all over the interior of America, you can still see the remnants of that time.

There are these little cylinders they look like maybe crystals or fossilized plant parts.

But really they are the remains of cry annoyed Z's tree like filter feeders.

Blanket ID that see.

But they were not plants, They were animals, beautiful animals.

And if you've ever wanted to see a fossil come to life, I've got good news for you because one cry annoyed czar, still common on earth as they have been for nearly half a 1,000,000,000 years.

And two, they do not disappoint in their beauty and oddity.

Franois come in two main flavors today the stock kind which we call see lilies and the unstoppable kinds which we call feather stars.

Now they look more like a kind of coral than anything else.

Like that.

They would just sit anchored to one spot in the ocean, filtering plankton on the water and chilling out.

But corals are collections of tiny organisms, and corals are very much stuck to one place cry.

Annoyed are animals.

They're macro organisms like us, and they can, though they don't often move.

Oh, yeah, I mean, I may be forgot to mention the main thing about feather stars, which is this like you've probably seen viral videos of this movement, but it isn't the kind of thing that, like it hurts tow Watch again.

Crime droids spend almost all of their time sitting in one spot, but they spend almost all of their viral video time engaging in this amazing, mesmerizing locomotion like other kind of terms, like starfish, sea urchin, sea cucumbers, etcetera, feather stars Are Pender radio Lee symmetrical?

They have five cited symmetry.

This is harder to see in crime noise, but it is a thing.

They might have any number of legs, but that number should be divisible by five, except that they often get their legs chewed off or knocked off that pretty delicate.

But they could just grow them back.

And while feather stars move around looking like the most unearthly, gorgeous thing that has yet happened.

Sea lilies, which are essentially the same thing like they're different species but very similar when they move around.

Yeah, they just dragged their stock behind them, just trudging across the ocean floor.

Check this out.

Their blood.

They have a vascular system.

Their blood is just water transports oxygen and nutrients and waste.

It does the whole vascular system thing, but it's just seawater talking about an organism that figured out how to do it thing before blood existed and is still doing that.

Franois have continued to adapt like they're locomotion.

That wasn't happening 500 million years ago.

That's relatively recently, like 200 million years ago.

But still try annoyed Sze, y'all did it.

Good work.

Just keep swimming, I guess, is what this is.

If you're a member of the Bizarre Bees pin club, we sent out feather stars early instead of armadillos.

If you're wondering whose fault that mix up was, wonder no longer thank you for being a part of that project.

All the money from it's going to help some of the most vulnerable people in the world so that everybody knows that you have to be a warehouse in store, have been closed down.

Everybody is still on staff.

We have to be up and running soon.

John, this episode was a really great break for me.

I hope it was for for you as well, and I'll see you on Tuesday.