Tullimonstrum gregarium – my Tully Monster model, seen from below (© Dr Karl Shuker)
Down through the decades since it first
attracted notable public and media attention during the early 1930s, Scotland's
(in)famous Loch Ness Monster has inspired all manner of suggestions as to its
possible zoological identity – always assuming, of course, that it actually
exists in the first place!
But none, surely, can be any stranger
than the little-known example revealed here, a veritable monster in its own
right – and which also featured at much the same time, moreover, in one of the
most extraordinary zoological hoaxes ever recorded, concerning a large and highly
dangerous yet hitherto inexplicably-overlooked species of dancing worm!
MEETING TULLY'S
MINI-MONSTER
In July 1966, based upon some fossils found
in Illinois and dating back 280-300 million years, Dr Eugene S. Richardson Jr
(1916-1983), Curator of Fossil Invertebrates from Chicago's Field Museum of
Natural History, fully described within that month's issue of the Field
Museum's scientific Bulletin a new
species of small, ostensibly inauspicious worm-like creature, but which has subsequently
proved to be one of the most zoologically baffling beasts ever recorded by
science. Not only that, it can also boast a couple of startling, unexpected
links to cryptozoology, as will now be seen.
The official taxonomic name of this
enigmatic little animal is Tullimonstrum
gregarium, which Richardson had bestowed upon it a short time previously in
the prestigious American weekly journal Science.
However, it is commonly known colloquially simply as the Tully Monster, and in
subsequent years it became so famous that in 1989 it was officially designated
the State fossil of Illinois.
This very strange species derives both
its binomial and its vernacular name from its fossils' discoverer, Francis J. Tully,
an amateur fossil collector who in 1958 had found some specimens of it in the
Mazon Creek formation, a series of fossil beds in Grundy County, northeastern Illinois,
which had been a coastal estuary during the Late Carboniferous Period when Tullimonstrum had thrived. Unable to
identify them, Tully took these mystifying specimens to the Field Museum, whose
palaeontologists were equally puzzled, never having seen anything like them
before.
However, further fossils of this archaic
mystery mini-beast were subsequently discovered – so many, in fact, that their
abundance inspired Richardson's eventual naming of it, because Tullimonstrum gregarium translates as
'common Tully monster'. Having said that, however, only one Tully Monster species
is known, and only one very specific locality for it is known (the Essex biota
section of the Mazon Creek fossil beds) – but what is not known at all, or at
least not for certain, is what on earth, or in earth, Tullimonstrum actually is!
The reason why this ancient anomaly is so
baffling is its morphology, which is so thoroughly bizarre that it has defied
all attempts by researchers to categorise with any degree of satisfaction or
confidence its singular species within any pre-existing taxon, not even one as
elevated in the taxonomic hierarchy as a phylum.
Vermiform in basic body shape and
measuring approximately 3-14 inches long, Tullimonstrum
is characterized by some truly novel attributes. At its anterior end is a long
slender proboscis terminating in a grasping, claw-like pair of jaws, each
containing up to eight small, sharp tooth-like structures. Just behind the base
of the proboscis is a thin transverse bar, at either end of which is a small
round organ believed to be a camera-like eye, each containing melanosomes whose
form and structure is consistent with such an identity for it. Further back
still are paired structures that have been identified as gills, and its most
posterior, tail-end body portion bears a pair of vertical fins resembling a
spade in shape. In addition, and the principal reason for its having incited so
much speculation as to its taxonomic identity, is the presence of what may be a rudimentary notochord or spinal
cord.
Tullimonstrum reconstructed as a lamprey-like beast (© Entelognathus/Wikipedia
– CC BY-SA 4.0 licence)
Every few years ever since its mid-1960s
description, a new study of its fossils results in a new idea being proposed in
the scientific literature as to what Tullimonstrum
may be, only for this to be hotly disputed by opposing viewpoints.
The most recent published study and
proffered opinion dates from as recently as April 2023, when a Japanese
research team announced that their advanced 3-D imaging techniques had revealed
that Tullimonstrum has segmentation
in its head region which extends from its body – something that no known
vertebrate lineage possesses. So in spite of possessing a putative notochord or
spinal cord, Tullimonstrum was not,
they believed, of vertebrate affinity.
Tullimonstrum reconstructed as an invertebrate (above), and as a vertebrate (below)
(© Fossiladder 13/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 4.0 licence)
Previous suggestions by earlier
researchers, meanwhile, have ranged from this latter beastie being a basal vertebrate
distantly related to lampreys, or an anomalocaridid-allied arthropod, to a
specialized form of mollusc, a worm, a conodont, or a chordate but of
non-vertebrate identity (like present-day tunicates).
As this present ShukerNature blog article
is not concerned primarily with either the taxonomic or the palaeontological
complexities and controversies relating to Tullimonstrum,
however, I shall abstain from presenting any further considerations of these
subjects here, and progress instead to what it is concerned with. Namely, two very surprising links between
Tully's weird little worm from the far-distant past and cryptozoology in modern
times.
IS THE TULLY
MONSTER THE LOCH NESS MONSTER?
Ever since the early 1930s, the Loch Ness
Monster has always been a major source of cryptozoological contention, but this
was especially true during the 1960s and 1970s, following Tim Dinsdale's
shooting in 1960 of his short but iconic cine-film purportedly showing a very
large, unidentified creature moving across and below the loch's surface.
Numerous Nessie-themed books and articles appeared during this period, but one
of the most unusual was undoubtedly The
Great Orm of Loch Ness: A Practical Inquiry Into the Nature and Habits of
Water-Monsters, authored by F.W. 'Ted' Holiday (1921-1979) and published in
1968.
Holiday had long been intrigued by Nessie
and other aquatic mystery beasts, but whereas in a second book, The Dragon and the Disc (1973), he
pursued a paranormal explanation for such entities (even linking them to UFOs),
in The Great Orm of Loch Ness he
adopted a more conventional approach, proposing a corporeal, zoological
identity for Nessie. However, the specific creature that he nominated was
decidedly unconventional.
Holding
my copy of Holiday's book The Great Orm
of Loch Ness (© Dr Karl Shuker/Faber & Faber – reproduced here on a
strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
Rather than any of the then-in vogue
herpetological contenders (such as a giant newt or frog-like amphibian, a
crocodilian reptile, or, most popular of all back in those times, a living
modern-day species of plesiosaur), after receiving a copy of Richardson's 1966
paper from a fellow LNM investigator Holiday boldly proposed that the Loch Ness
Monster was nothing less than a gargantuan present-day descendant of the Tully
Monster!
Holiday postulated that Nessie's
frequently-reported long slender neck was in reality the elongate proboscis of
his proposed giant Tullimonstrum,
that Nessie's front flippers were actually his latter hypothesised creature's transverse
appendages, and that Nessie's posterior body region, sometimes likened by
eyewitnesses to a finned tail, was in fact the latter's paired vertical tail
fins. He also saw indications of two dorsal humps in various photographs and
other illustrations of Tullimonstrum
fossils that might explain Nessie's famous humps if present in a giant Tully
Monster.
Speaking of which, he pondered whether
the small specimens of this extraordinary fossil creature so far discovered
were only immature examples, and that perhaps there were full-sized (i.e.
Nessie-sized) specimens still awaiting scientific discovery:
Moreover, it is
by no means impossible that sections or parts of much larger Tully monsters may
even now be reposing in museum basements awaiting identification.
Fifty-five years have passed since
Holiday wrote those optimistic words, but as yet, however, no such specimens
have come to light. Nor is that the only major issue with Holiday's attempts to
identify the Loch Ness Monster with the Tully Monster. The sad but simple truth
is that he had misunderstood the true nature of certain key aspects of the latter's
morphology, which inevitably had led his proposals badly astray.
Loch
Ness (public domain)
For instance, in his book he referred to
the most anterior jawed portion of Tullimonstrum
as its head, whereas in reality it is nothing more than the terminal jaws of this
creature's long proboscis – and which Holiday misrepresented as its neck.
Similarly, he did his best to identify the transverse bar behind the base of
the proboscis as a pair of locomotory paddles, when in reality the pair of fleshy
lobes at the two ends of this bar are believed to be visual organs, because
they appear to contain some form of retinal structure. And what he envisaged as
humps along its back appear to be nothing more than artifacts caused by the
flattening of the fragile Tullimonstrum specimens
during their fossilization.
Of course, one might suggest in Holiday's
defence that by not being a zoologist or palaeontologist he could be forgiven
for drawing such erroneous conclusions. Unfortunately, however, this defence
falls by the wayside when we discover that his book also includes as an
appendix the full text of Richardson's July 1966 Bulletin paper describing Tullimonstrum,
in which its body regions' anatomy and functions are accurately documented by
Richardson. In addition, Holiday had even corresponded directly with Richardson
regarding his proposal that Nessie was a giant Tully Monster (but regarding
which Richardson had in turn expressed grave misgivings to him). Consequently,
Holiday had no excuse for his own highly inaccurate assumptions regarding these
same matters.
Tullimonstrum, the Tully Monster – but evidently not the Loch Ness Monster (©
Tim Morris)
Holiday had long believed that Nessie was
some form of giant worm – hence the title of his book, the word 'orm' being an
archaic version of 'worm'. This latter term is in turn sometimes applied not
merely in zoology to limbless elongate invertebrates of the earthworm and
outwardly similar kind, but also in western mythology to dragons that fit that
same description, i.e. elongate and limbless, such as the famous Lambton worm
and Laidly worm. This therefore explains why his second book, linking Nessie to
UFOs, was entitled The Dragon and the
Disc.
Holiday also considered the Tully Monster
to be a worm, but one of a uniquely plesiosaurian shape:
Tully's monster
did one great thing. It firmly demonstrated that wormlike animals with the
appearance of a plesiosaurus did once exist.
Typical
plesiosaurian representation of Loch Ness Monster (© Richard Svensson)
If so, this could explain not only
Nessie's shape when seen by eyewitnesses but also why it wasn't seen more often,
i.e. on a regular basis. For if Nessie were indeed a worm, it could therefore absorb
oxygen from the loch's water directly through its body's outer layer (epidermal
respiration, like frogs and salamanders can often do), not needing to surface
on a frequent basis in order to inhale air into its lungs like a mammal or
reptile would need to do. Accordingly, Holiday concluded his personal
identification of Nessie as a giant undiscovered modern-day Tully Monster with
the following bold statement:
No-one knows whether
the Orm of Loch Ness is a form of Tullimonstrum;
but, talking most unscientifically, I would bet my shirt that it is.
Sadly, however, I think that my above
account of how and why his understanding of Tullimonstrum
is seriously flawed, and, as an inevitable consequence, his conclusion that a
giant version of this species does indeed explain Nessie is wholly wayward,
proffers more than sufficient evidence to suggest that Holiday would have
certainly lost his shirt!
THE DANCING
WORMS OF TURKANA
At much the same time that Holiday was
seeking with fervor but ultimate futility to link the Tully Monster to the Loch
Ness Monster, Tullimonstrum was also
hitting the cryptozoological headlines for a very different yet no less
memorable reason.
On 1 September 1966, after reading a
report in the East African Standard
(a very well known newspaper in what was then British East Africa) concerning
the discovery and Richardson's recent scientific description of Tullimonstrum, a retired army
Lieutenant-Colonel named R.G.L. Cloudesley, from Nairobi in Kenya, wrote an
extraordinary letter to Richardson, in which he made the following potentially
exciting claim. The relevant portion reads as follows:
In 1926 having been seconded to the Kings (now Kenya) African
Rifles from the Indian Army, I was in northwestern Kenya dealing with some
border incidents. Passing through the administrative centre of Lodwar on my return journey,
I took the opportunity of calling upon Mr. A. M.
Champion, then D. C. Turkana District. In addition to being a keen shikar,
Champion was a naturalist of the first rank, and during the two evenings I
passed in his company he regaled me with many a fascinating yarn about the
fauna of the area. Among these was one about a remarkable worm reputed to live
in the swamp country to the southeast. The local tribesmen told fantastic
stories about its dancing and giving milk, if I remember correctly. Such
nonsense aside, Champion did give me a description of the creature which he
had obtained from various natives (he never succeeded in getting a specimen)
and this curiously enough has remained in my memory when much else has been
forgotten. His account agreed remarkably well with the illustration of your
"Tully Monster," even to the "paddles" and the long snout.
Your mention of sharp teeth, incidentally, does agree with a Turkana tale that
the creature bites. On this account they are deathly afraid of it, believing
that it is poisonous. But then nearly all natives believe everything of the
creeping or crawling kind to be venomous.
I hardly dare to suggest that a relation of your extinct
"Monster" still survives in one of the remotest parts of East Africa,
but it might just be worthwhile to pursue the matter.
Turkana is a northwestern county in
Kenya, famous for the discovery there of various significant fossil hominid
remains.
Unsurprisingly, Richardson was very
interested in Cloudesley's letter, but even before he had chance to reply to it
he received a second letter of note, dated 13 September 1966, this time from
Purshottan S. Patel of Nakuru, a town situated about 100 miles northwest of
Nairobi. Patel informed Richardson that something like Tullimonstrum may actually be existing in Turkana's lakes, as he'd
been told by relatives of a strange form of dancing worm that lived in these
watery expanses.
The
long-extinct Tullimonstrum gregarium –
but was there a living Tully Monster species of terpsichorean tendency awaiting
scientific discovery in the lakes of Turkana? (© Stanton F. Fink/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.5 licence)
Not long afterwards, Richardson received
a third letter, dated 8 September 1966, from Joseph N. Ngomo, an intermediate
school teacher from Nakuru, who informed him that after his class had read the Standard newspaper's report concerning Tullimonstrum, several of his pupils had
claimed that they'd been told of a similar-sounding creature from their
fathers. Ngomo included in his letter a note written by one such pupil, a boy
named Akai, which stated that these worms are known locally as the ekurut loedonkakini,
swim and "wave hands" during the full moon, give milk, and possess a
bite fatal to humans.
By now, Richardson was sufficiently
intrigued by these ostensibly independent yet closely corroborating
communications to suggest to his colleagues at the Field Museum that an
expedition in search of Turkana's tantalising dancing worms might be justified,
because if they did turn out to be a living Tullimonstrum
species this would obviously be a very momentous zoological discovery. First of
all, however, a note requesting any additional information regarding these
creatures was prepared by the Museum and duly published in the Newsletter of the East African Natural
History Association – but none was forthcoming.
3D
model of Tullimonstrum gregarium as a
vertebrate (© Петр Меньшиков-Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 4.0 licence)
In early 1967, while the proposed expedition
was still at the planning stage, Richardson was visited by a former colleague,
palaeontologist Dr Bryan Patterson (1909-1979), now a professor at Harvard
University but previously Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology at the Chicago
Field Museum. Patterson had recently conducted some field work in Kenya and
stated that he actually knew the uncle of Richardson's second correspondent,
Patel. However, Patterson also stated that he'd never heard of dancing worms at
Turkana, and seemed highly amused by the whole subject – as well he might be.
For it subsequently transpired that
Cloudesley, Patel, Ngomo, and Akai did not exist – they had all been created,
and their communications written, by none other than Patterson himself, as a
prank with which to fool his friend Richardson, and which had clearly succeeded
very successfully!
Fake
photograph of Dr Bryan Patterson and a shot Tullimonstrum
(public domain)
Happily, Richardson took it all in good
spirit after receiving the truth from Patterson in a Christmas 1968 letter that
also included a humorous hoax photograph in which Patterson was posing in full
field regalia holding a rifle and a supposed shot specimen of a sizeable Tullimonstrum. Indeed, after cancelling
his planned expedition to search for it, Richardson even prepared a short book
entitled The Dancing Worm of Turkana,
publishing it in 1969 under the pseudonym E. Scumas Rory. In it, he reproduced
all four of the principal fake communications sent to him by Patterson, and
also briefly referred to a second missive that he'd received from 'Patel', plus
several additional ones sent to him by various other correspondents.
Additionally, Richardson revealed in this
book that F.W. Holiday had written to 'Cloudesley' for information, but had
never received a reply (for obvious reasons now!). Moreover, Richardson even
contributed an introduction to the book under his own name, together with some
fine illustrations under his Rory pseudonym, and nowadays this literary
curiosity is a highly-collectable publication in its original hard-copy format
(several websites contain downloadable public-domain pdf versions of it).
The Dancing Worm of Turkana, front cover (public domain)
In short, even though the dancing worms
of Turkana never existed, they are immortalized in print, meaning that their
impact, albeit transitory, upon the zoological world will also live on!
Finally: the name 'E. Scumas Rory' seems
so unlikely, even contrived, that I cannot help but wonder whether in reality
it is a clever anagram, but I've been unable to discover one from it. So if any
anagram aficionados are reading this article, perhaps they would like to see
whether they can extract one – and, if anyone does, I'd greatly welcome
details!
An
ekurut loedonkakini or Turkana dancing worm, biting a man – sketch by 'E,
Scumas Rory' (public domain)
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