laguna
Well-known member
Has been solved!
I must admit I've never even heard of it, its supposed to be a monster but it doesn't look all that big to me? Fascinating though all the same, love the artists impression
Uncovered more than a half a century ago, the "Tully monster" found in 1958 in the Mazon Creek in Illinois has puzzled palaeontologists who, frankly, could not make heads, tails or claws of its fossilized remains.
Researchers from Yale University say they have figured out the monster’s identity: It’s a vertebrate most closely related to the lamprey.
A reconstruction
The fossil was named after Francis Tully, the amateur who discovered it.
To come to their conclusion, team members first pored over 1,200 Tully monster specimens from museums. They closely examined the creature’s features, like its torpedo-shaped body and triangular tail, the proboscis that looks like an elephant’s trunk with sharp teeth, and the eyes on the side of its head, which resemble a hammerhead, but are similar to eye stalks found in crabs and insects.
“The frustrating thing is that these morphological features are not typical of any group,” said Victoria McCoy, a palaeontologist and lead author on the paper. “But they do not rule out any group very easily.”
The clue that led them to closing the cold case was a lightly coloured structure scientists had previously identified as the creature’s gut. Only it wasn’t a gut. It was the notochord, the primitive backbone.
By further examining the notochord, the fossil sleuths noticed that the structure curved down as it went through the creature’s tail. In animals like sharks, the notochord curves up into the top fin of the tail, and in some fish it goes through the middle of the tail. But in lampreys the notochord curves down.
I must admit I've never even heard of it, its supposed to be a monster but it doesn't look all that big to me? Fascinating though all the same, love the artists impression
Uncovered more than a half a century ago, the "Tully monster" found in 1958 in the Mazon Creek in Illinois has puzzled palaeontologists who, frankly, could not make heads, tails or claws of its fossilized remains.
Researchers from Yale University say they have figured out the monster’s identity: It’s a vertebrate most closely related to the lamprey.
A reconstruction
The fossil was named after Francis Tully, the amateur who discovered it.
To come to their conclusion, team members first pored over 1,200 Tully monster specimens from museums. They closely examined the creature’s features, like its torpedo-shaped body and triangular tail, the proboscis that looks like an elephant’s trunk with sharp teeth, and the eyes on the side of its head, which resemble a hammerhead, but are similar to eye stalks found in crabs and insects.
“The frustrating thing is that these morphological features are not typical of any group,” said Victoria McCoy, a palaeontologist and lead author on the paper. “But they do not rule out any group very easily.”
The clue that led them to closing the cold case was a lightly coloured structure scientists had previously identified as the creature’s gut. Only it wasn’t a gut. It was the notochord, the primitive backbone.
By further examining the notochord, the fossil sleuths noticed that the structure curved down as it went through the creature’s tail. In animals like sharks, the notochord curves up into the top fin of the tail, and in some fish it goes through the middle of the tail. But in lampreys the notochord curves down.
