The Tully Monster: A Review and Discussion
At the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte in Illinois, USA, an animal that has resisted classification for more than half a century continues to perplex palaeontologists. This is the Tully monster, Tullimonstrum gregarium. It lived approximately 309 million years ago during the Pennsylvanian Subperiod of the Carboniferous and measured about 8–35 cm in length. It had an elongate body, a long proboscis projecting from the front of the animal and terminating in a pair of pincer-like claws, and dorsal and ventral fins at the tail. A slender transverse bar extended across the anterior part of the body, with a rounded structure at each end. These structures were subsequently identified as eyes on the basis of the melanosomes preserved within them. The combination of all these features in a single animal is so unusual that the Tully monster has lacked a stable taxonomic position ever since its discovery in 1955.
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