The Turley Monster mystery only grows stranger

Sometimes evolution can produce organisms that are very strange and wonderfully different from those we know that scientists are confused. Enter the Tully Monster, a soft-body sea creature swimming in the muddy estuary of today’s Illinois about 300 million years ago.

It was discovered in 1955 by an amateur fossil collector called Francis Tully. Mazon Creek Fossil Bed To the northeast of the state.

The Tully Monster appeared to have a torpedo shape with triangular tail fins and teeth at the ends of the long bent Absis, and it looked like someone had stabbed his back with a skewer, then his eyes at each end.

It uses the appropriate scientific terminology here. Tully took the fossil (below) to the Outdoor Natural History Museum in Chicago, where experts were covered in bamboo.

Was it a worm? Was it a slug? Did you have a backbone? Is it an eel? They had no idea, so they called it Talimontherum Gregalium. This is the Latin word for “Tallie’s common monster.”

In 1989, the Tully Monster became the official state fossil of Illinois, but no one knew what it was. After that, two papers were written in 2016. It has been publishedboth suggest a Tally monster It was certainly a vertebrate.

The structure previously thought to be the intestine of animals was found to be a primitive skeletal-like structure called the notochord, but the pigments of the eye were determined to be vertebrates, like invertebrates.

Backbone made of cartilage, teeth made of keratin, single nostrils, dorsal fin, perhaps the Tully monster could be a distant relative of modern lamprey. The classification mystery has been solved. But not everyone is sure.

Skeptics pointed out that the pigment in the eye was not convincing, and that the notochord stretched out right in front of the eye, which was strange. Maybe it was a strange squid? Perhaps a strange squid?

After that, in 2023, Japanese researchers I looked closely at 153 museum specimens. If the previous approach was subjective and driven by researcher premonitions, this time a neutral, data-driven approach was used.

Using a 3D scanner, we created color-coded digital maps of the animal’s surface, leading to the fact that presumed vertebrate-like features such as gill pouches and fin rays, whether they were vertebrate-like or not at all. Furthermore, the Tully monster was shown to have segments not only in its body but also in its head area.

It was possible that the Tully monsters were ultimately vertebrates, as vertebrates were not known to have this particular feature arrangement.

Or is it possible? Today the ju umpire is still out and the joy of the Tully Monster is that it is just a mystery that continues to give. The best guess from the Japanese team is that it is “invertebrate strings.” This is a category that includes animals like eels, such as lancelets, but honestly, no one knows for sure.

Therefore, until consensus is reached, the Tully monsters remain in taxonomic range.

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