Since 1958, when amateur collector Frank Tully
found a mysterious fossil sample, a bizarre creature has had palaeontologists
scratching their heads. The Tully Monster, as it came to be known, was so named
because scientists could not even determine to which phylum the creature
belonged. it's just as funny-lookin'. It has a soft, tube-shaped body that
tapers to a long, thin snout with a toothy end, eyes that protrude outwards
from either side of its mid-section on stalks, and a finned rear. Scientists
had thought it some sort of squishy invertebrate, like a sort of worm or slug.
However, a team of researchers from The Field Museum of Natural History, Yale,
Argonne National Laboratory, and the American Museum of Natural History have
studied the creature in depth, and have revealed that that is not the case.
Their paper has been published today in the journal Nature.
Later scientifically named as tullimonstrum,
an extinct species which are bilateral
and lived around shallow tropical coastal. Its about 14 inches (35 cm) long, it
had a vertical tail fin and a long, narrow dorsal fin. A intense research about
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.
"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.
By: Renuka Devi (FullFry)
