BRAND LOYALTY
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The Tully Monster was a pretty cool animal — and not just because of its name. It’s one of the most enigmatic specimens ever found.
And now, half a century after its discovery, researchers claim to have found the creature’s place in the tree of life. According to their analysis of a body structure previously assumed to be the gut, the strange blob of a creature is actually a vertebrate in disguise — a relative of modern lampreys.
“There are plenty of fossils that are really enigmatic, but the Tully Monster has always been kind of in a class of its own,” said Yale University’s Victoria McCoy, lead author on the study published Wednesday in Nature.
When the first Tullimonstrum gregarium fossil was uncovered by Francis Tully in 1958, the amateur fossil hunter wasn’t sure what the strange Illinois native might be. Even when professional pale- ontologists examined the specimen, they were puzzled. That’s not so unusual, but it is for a fossil of T. gregarium’s age: at just 300 million years old or so, it’s from a time when lots of more familiar creatures lived. Scientists are generally able to sort newly discovered animals from this era into previously defined categories. But the researchers who studied Tully’s “monster” took nearly a decade to pub- lish their first official description of it.
Even then, “the only conclusion was that it was so bizarre-looking that they couldn’t assign it to any known family of animals,” McCoy explained.
And indeed the mysterious fossil looked monstrous: As more specimens were found in the Illinois area (it’s now designated as the official state fossil) it became clear that T. gregarium had a strange form. The creature had a long, eel-like body that could grow up to a foot long, and a skinny snout topped off with a long tooth or claw. Its eyes were at the end of short, rigid horizontal stalks — much like the eyes of a hammerhead shark.
One previous study used computer analysis to conclude that the Tully Monster, though apparently made entirely of soft tissues, was from an extinct group of chordates — the phylum that includes vertebrates like ourselves.
The new study takes this a step farther, suggesting the Tully Monster was actually a jawless fish like today’s lampreys.