today's most exciting happenings all involved Creatures

[kaberett]

Not to me personally, alas, but! Nonetheless!

Creature The First (courtesy of the algorithm): The Red Triangle Slug. (Special mention: With Grazing Marks From Its Radula.)

Creature The Second: The Tully Monster.

Introduced to me via the following (Otherlands, Thomas Halliday, chapter eleven):

Unlike the fabled monsters of modern cryptozoology -- Nessie, the Sasquatch, the chupacabra -- the Tully Monster is real, but beyond that, there is very little we understand about it. It is not as if they are rare; these creatures are the size of herring and just as plentiful, found by the hundred. More than thirty times as many body fossils of Tullimonstrum have been found as the well-known first bird, Archaeopteryx, so, numerically, it should be a simple story. But interpreting their remains is difficult because of what each specimen preserves. They have a segmented torpedo of a body, and at the rear, two rippling tail fins that look a little like the wings of squid. At the front, a long, thin feature, something like the hose of a vacuum cleaner, wiggles, with tiny a tiny, tooth-filled grabbing claw at its end. Adding further confusion, there is a solid bar running from side to side across the top of the creature, horizontal stalks on which are set bulbous organs of some kind, which are generally assumed to be its eyes. All in all, it is unlike anything else that is known in over half a billion years of animal evolution.

[...]

The question for Tullimonstrum is not whether it exists, but what it actually is. Over the years, palaeontologists have gazed ever closer at its curious anatomy and concluded variously that it is a kind of worm, maybe a ribbon worm, or related to the annelids, the group that includes earthworms, or nematodes, the group of mostly microscopic worms that exist by the trillion practically everywhere on Earth. Or perhaps it is an arthropod like spiders, crabs, or woodlice, or a mollusc like a snail, or even a vertebrate. Those lumps on the end of the horizontal bar? Are they eyes, or could they be pressure sensors? Are they involved in reproduction, or in stabilizing Tullimonstrum as it swims? Nothing provokes debate quite like the hunting of monsters.

(Which passage also, I feel, fairly neatly illustrates my thing of "this was written to be spoken aloud by someone already familiar with what it said".)

Infuriatingly, the book did not contain an illustration of any kind, and so -- remembering the friendly articulated snail -- I headed off to Printables Dot Com, in the hope of finding a Friendly Articulated Whatever-This-Thing-Is.

And. Well. It's... it's not articulated, but it is the Illinois state fossil...

Following which discovery I did head back to wikipedia (do you begin to get a sense of why it's taking me so long?) and thereby learned that the single known species is Tullimonstrum gregarium, which I am choosing to translate, loosely but for obvious reasons, as "friendly".

---

Side note: it turns out that while "shaking down google scholar for medical research" doesn't affect the Recommended Articles google sends me... palaeontology is apparently close enough to my actual field that the googly overbeing has decided I've taken a step sideways into fossils and now wants to tell me ALL ABOUT Gorgonopsia, because I went "wait WHAT" in the previous chapter and hunted down Whitney et al. (2017), describing the first known odontoma (content note: Teeth)...

Comments

[kaberett]

NB Tullimonstrum was present around 300 million years ago. Stegosaurs were extant around 170-100 million years ago. Icon use is wildly misleading à la dinosaurs speaking German.

[shanaqui]

I can hear David Attenborough narrating that excerpt...

re: your note, the Googly overbeing is completely and utterly befuddled by me, and has more or less given up on trying to figure out what my field is. I'm okay with that, as you can imagine from knowing me.

[redbird]

The "what is it, though?" about the tullymonster reminded me of conodonts, which were named in the mid-19th century and remained enigmatic until the 1980s.

[contrarywise]

In a curious bit of synchronicity, just last night I learned of The Museum of the Earth and the Paleontological Research Institute. The latter organization has an online Gift Shop that sells Paleozoic Pals, a series of adorable plush prehistoric creatures including the Tully Monster! You know, in case you might want one of your own.

[lunabee34]

That's so bizarre looking!