The word ‘monster’ has its origin in the Latin monere ‘to warn’ but has broadened out in its usage. It has even reverted to its origins as a verb: a highly critical, verbal attack. But I prefer ‘something about which one needs to be warned’, and the Tully Monster encapsulates that meaning. It once lived in Illinois, specifically at just a single location, Mazon Creek, where thousands of them have been seen. But should you be especially fearful of Tullimonstrum gregarium? Well, at first sight, no; it’s only about 10 cm long and apparently has no proper bones and it’s dead. The first was spotted in a coal-mine waste heap by Francis Tully in 1958, a pipefitter with an interest in Carboniferous fossils. Two years after his death in 1987, he and his monster were honoured by a bill that the Illinois State Legislature passed to make it the official State Fossil.
It seems to have become a ‘monster’ by stumping all previous attempts to categorise it; so much so that it long served as a warning to eager palaeontologists not to tangle with its taxonomy. That’s not surprising, because as well as bearing a passing resemblance to Captain Nemo’s submarine in Jules Verne’s 20 000 leagues Under the Sea, it has some truly astonishing features. Portholes down its sides are not the weirdest – actually they are gill openings. It has a biting apparatus at the end of an absurdly lengthy forward protuberance, that would not be unexpected if it were one of those fish from the Amazon that, you know, men really ought to be warned about. Most of us would not share a bath with it if we had been. And then, there are the eyes on the ends of a dorsal bar which would give Tullimonstrum gregarium superb stereoscopic vision to guide it unerringly to its target, lashing its efficient-looking caudal fin. The fact that it has only a single nostril is merely puzzling by comparison.
Six decades on, Victoria McCoy of Yale University (now at Leicester University, UK) and 15 undeterred colleagues have pored over more than 1200 Tully Monster fossils and seem to have cracked its affinities (McCoy, V.E. et al. 2016. The ‘Tully monster’ is a vertebrate. Nature, v. 532, p. 496-499). In fact, it’s surprising that it has remained an enigma for so long, because McCoy and colleagues have documented almost every aspect of its anatomy, available from a huge number of superbly preserved specimens – teeth, fin, muscle traces, gills, nostril, notochord, gut and so on. As well as being a vertebrate, its dreadful proboscis is very like that of the Cambrian oddity Opabinia from the Burgess Shale. A separate study by four British palaeontologists and a Texan concentrated on the eyes using electron microscopy and found ‘ultrastructural details’, including pigment cells (Clements, T. et al. 2016. The eyes of Tullimonstrum reveal a vertebrate affinity. Nature, v. 532, p. 500-503) which unequivocally confirm that it is a vertebrate. It has all the hallmarks of being related to lampreys and hagfishs. They devour rotting, drowned corpses.
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