MUSEUM-QUALITY pyritized Starfish Fossil Furcaster regenerated arm Bundenbach

Description

A large and well-preserved specimen of a pyritized starfish from the famous Bundenbach Konservat-Lagerstätte of the Hunsrück slate mountains. This specimen is from an old German collection (label of the collection attached on the back) and what is especially remarkable about this starfish is that one of the arms is much shorter than the others and suddenly becomes very slender half-way through its length, implying this distal moiety of the arm has been regenerated after injury. Such examples are very rare in the fossil record!
The famous quarries at Bundenbach are now being filled up with garbage and the prospect of new finds from this area in the future is almost zero, so you can be sure that there will not be much if anything offered from there in the future.
Species
:
Furcaster paleozoicus
Locality
: Bundenbach, Rheinland Pfalz, Germany
Geological
context
: Kaub formation
Age
: Emsian stage, Devonian period
Size
: 10,5cm starfish on 22x17x0,6cm matrix.