Credit: Yale University/Sean McMahon |
For more than half a century, scientists have scratched their heads over the nature of an outlandishly bizarre creature dubbed the Tully Monster.
But researchers today announced they had finally solved the mystery of the creature, which flourished about 307 million years ago in a coastal estuary in what is now north-eastern Illinois.
They analysed numerous fossils of the creature, named Tullimonstrum gregarium, and determined it was not a segmented worm or a free-swimming slug, as once hypothesised, but rather a type of jawless fish called a lamprey. |
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"I would rank the Tully Monster just about at the top of the scale of weirdness," said paleontologist Victoria McCoy of Britain's University of Leicester, who conducted the study while at Yale University.
It boasted a torpedo-shaped body, a jointed, trunk-like snout ending in a claw-like structure studded with two rows of conical teeth, and its eyes were set on the ends of a long rigid bar extending sideways from its head.
The creature was up to about 35 centimetres long and had a vertical tail fin and a long, narrow dorsal fin.
A sophisticated reassessment of the fossils determined it was a vertebrate, with gills and a stiffened rod, or notochord, that functioned as a rudimentary spinal cord and supported its body.
The notochord previously had been identified as the gut. |
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