Polyzyklische Chinone in fossilen und rezenten Crinoiden

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If preservation conditions are favourable even complex organic molecules may survive in the fossil record and can be found within fossils of the organisms that produced them. Such endogenous fossil compounds have attracted increasing attention in the last few years. However, although such compounds can provide valuable paleobiological and geochemical information, the knowledge of organic molecules preserved in fossil organisms in general is extremely poor until now. The proposed project represents an interdisciplinary case study and is focused on the chemical characterization of organic constituents from fossil and modern crinoids (marine animals, Echinodermata). Since almost unchanged biomolecules (polycyclic quinone pigments) have been extracted from two purple coloured crinoids of Jurassic and Triassic age (240 million years old in the latter case) and similar pigments still occur in living crinoids, 2 this class of animals provides an unique opportunity to study the occurrence of these (and other) biomolecules and their diagenetic products in earth history. Such data can provide new insights in the chemical evolution of polycyclic quinones (and polyketide compounds in general) with possible implications for chemotaxonomy. Moreover, data from crinoids with different states of preservation can provide important information on the transformation processes of organic molecules during diagenesis.