Cthulu lives! Or lived. Sort of
Palaeontologists reveal a multi-tentacled creature of the deep.
A creature with more than a passing resemblance to Chthulu, the mythical creature created by author HP Lovecraft in the 1920s, once actually existed, palaeontologists have revealed – although at just three centimetres wide, it was hardly a danger to shipping or buildings.
Not, of course, that there were any human-made structures around when Sollasina cthulhu prowled across the ocean floor some 430 million years ago.
The creature, a very distant ancestor of sea cucumbers and sea slugs, is revealed in a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It was found in fossilised form in the UK county of Hereford. Researchers led by Imran Rahman from the University of Oxford then spent months painstakingly grinding it away, taking photographs at every stage, resulting in an accurate 3D computer reconstruction. The creature boasted a couple of dozen tubular tentacles, which it used, Rahman and colleagues suggest, to both move around the seafloor and suck up prey.