Welcome to the sinister garden party

#tfw you're trying really hard to hide from Monday 😶‍🌫️

Feather stars are part of an ancient group of echinoderms called crinoids. They're distant relatives of the sea stars and sea urchins you might find in coastal tide pools. Feather stars cling to rocks, corals, and sponges with claw-like appendages called cirri.

Those same rocky habitats provide shelter for plenty of other deep-sea animals. Basket stars (Gorgonocephalus eucnemis) perch high above the seafloor, stretching out their branched arms to catch zooplankton and other drifting food.

Upending long-held beliefs about how the prehistoric reptiles commemorated a juvenile female’s transition into adulthood, new evidence published Thursday by researchers at Montana State University suggests that dinosaurs had quinceañeras. “As we examined fossilized footprints in a traditional waltz pattern at dig sites across multiple continents, it became clear that dinosaurs did in fact throw lavish 15th birthday parties for their female offspring, usually with friends and extended family members present,” said paleontologist Edwin Scanlon, who cited the prevalence of petrified las últimas muñecas in sedimentary rock layers and observed that the practice of holding a Catholic mass to mark the 15-year-old’s emergence into Mesozoic society appears to have been common among tyrannosaurs, diplodocuses, and other dinosaurs.

The dollhouse grave marker of Vivian Mae Allison (1894-1899) in the Connersville City Cemetery in Connersville, Indiana.