#3819 - Flabellum pavoninum
The binomial means 'peacock's-tail fan'.
Originally described as Flabellum circulare by the Australian paleontologist and geologist Julian Tenison-Woods in 1880. F. pavoninum is still around, and has been nicknamed 'dentures of the sea', based on the shape of the endoskeleton.
A genus of solitary coral, with 47 living species and almost 150 more from the fossil record, back as far as the Cretaceous. Some of them, like pavoninum, are deep-sea species living down to over a kilometer deep, and rely entirely on captured prey for food, unlike shallow-water corals that farm algae inside their own tissues.
Live ones look like this -
Photo by Nick Hobgood on Wikipedia.
Museum of the Vanished World, Duntroon, Aotearoa New Zealand.
