Creationism in Crisis - No Gods Were Found When Scientists Close Yet Another Gap in The Fossil Record.

Creationism in Crisis

No Gods Were Found When Scientists Close Yet Another Gap in The Fossil Record.

The Tully Monster, Tullimonstrum gregarium.
Vertebrate or invertebrate?

Tully monster, Tullimonstrum gregarium

Image credit: Stocktrek Images/Getty Images

New details of Tully monster revealed | The University of Tokyo

Discovered in 1950 and first described in the literature in 1966, the Tully Monster, has long been an enigma with no clear indication, or consensus, about its taxonomic status as either a primitive vertebrate related to the jawless fish such as lampreys, or a non-vertebrate, more closely related to cephalopods such as squids and octopuses.

The Tully Monster is a prehistoric animal that lived approximately 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous period. It was first discovered in 1958 by Francis Tully, a fossil collector, in the Mazon Creek fossil beds in northeastern Illinois. The Tully Monster is known for its unique appearance and has puzzled scientists since its discovery.

The Tully Monster has a long, narrow body that is segmented, and it measures around 14 inches in length. It has a distinct proboscis or trunk-like structure that ends in a toothed claw, which is believed to have been used for hunting prey. It also has a pair of large, stalked eyes, a small mouth, and a pair of fin-like structures that run along its body.

Scientists have debated the classification of the Tully Monster for decades. Its soft-tissue anatomy is not well-preserved, which makes it difficult to determine its exact relationship to other animals. Some researchers have proposed that it is related to modern cephalopods, such as squids and octopuses, while others have suggested that it is related to worms or even early vertebrates.

Recent studies, however, have shed more light on the Tully Monster's classification. In 2016, researchers analyzed the chemical composition of the Tully Monster's eyes and found that they were made up of a type of protein called melanin. This discovery suggests that the Tully Monster was a type of vertebrate, possibly related to lampreys.

Despite this new evidence, the Tully Monster remains a subject of debate among scientists, and its true classification may remain a mystery for some time. The Tully Monster has become an icon in the world of paleontology, and it continues to fascinate scientists and the public alike.

References:

1. Briggs, D. E. G., & Wilby, P. R. (1996). The Tully monster and other Cambrian and Permian "monsters". Paleontological Society Papers, 2, 67-79.
2. McCoy, V. E., Saupe, E. E., Lamsdell, J. C., Tarhan, L. G., McMahon, S., & Lidgard, S. (2016). The "Tully monster" is a vertebrate. Nature, 532(7600), 496-499.
3. Clements, T., Dolan, M. F., & Field, D. J. (2020). The Tully Monster is not a vertebrate: characters, convergence and taphonomy in Palaeozoic problematic animals. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 287(1927), 20201802.

ChatGPT. (18 Apr 2023). Tell me about the Tully Monster, with references, please [Response to a user question]. Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/

Creationists love these sorts of gaps in which to sit their ever-shrinking little god. They also love disagreement in science, claiming it shows scientists can’t make their minds up (So God did it!)

But now a team of palaeontologists from Tokyo and Nagoya Universities, Japan, believe they have solved the puzzle and shown that Tullimonstrum gregarium is not a vertebrate. They have published their finding in Palaeontology, the journal of the Palaeontological Association.

The University of Tokyo's news release explains the research:

The Tully monster. Discovered in the 1950s and first described in a paper in 1966, the Tully monster, with its stalked eyes and long proboscis, is difficult to compare to all other known animal groups. Unique to Illinois in the U.S., it became its state fossil in 1989.

© 2023 Takahiro Sakono

For more than half a century, the Tully monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium), an enigmatic animal that lived about 300 million years ago, has confounded paleontologists, with its strange anatomy making it difficult to classify. Recently, a group of researchers proposed a hypothesis that Tullimonstrum was a vertebrate similar to cyclostomes (jawless fish like lamprey and hagfish). If it was, then the Tully monster would potentially fill a gap in the evolutionary history of early vertebrates. Studies so far have both supported and rejected this hypothesis. Now, using 3D imaging technology, a team in Japan believes it has found the answer after uncovering detailed characteristics of the Tully monster which strongly suggest that it was not a vertebrate. However, its exact classification and what type of invertebrate it was is still to be decided.

In the 1950s, Francis Tully was enjoying his hobby fossil hunting in a site known as Mazon Creek Lagerstätte in the U.S. state of Illinois, when he discovered what would later become known as the Tully monster. This 15-centimeter (on average), 300-million-year-old marine “monster” turned out to be an enigma, as ever since its discovery researchers have debated where it fits in the classification of living things (its taxonomic position). Unlike dinosaur bones and hard-shelled creatures that are often found as fossils, the Tully monster was soft-bodied. The Mazon Creek Lagerstätte is one of the few places in the world where the conditions were just right for imprints of these marine animals to be captured in detail in the underwater mud, before they could decay. In 2016, a group of scientists in the US proposed a hypothesis that the Tully monster was a vertebrate. If this was the case, then it could be a missing piece of the puzzle on how vertebrates evolved.

We believe that the mystery of it being an invertebrate or vertebrate has been solved. Based on multiple lines of evidence, the vertebrate hypothesis of the Tully monster is untenable. The most important point is that the Tully monster had segmentation in its head region that extended from its body. This characteristic is not known in any vertebrate lineage, suggesting a nonvertebrate affinity.

There were many interesting animals that were never preserved as fossils. In this sense, research on the fossils from Mazon Creek is important because it provides paleontological evidence that cannot be obtained from other sites. More and more research is needed to extract important clues from Mazon Creek fossils to understand the evolutionary history of life.

Tomoyuki Mikami, lead author
Then a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Science
University of Tokyo
Now at the National Museum of Nature and Science.

Despite considerable effort, studies both supporting and rejecting this hypothesis have been published in recent years, and so a consensus had not been reached. However, new research by a team from the University of Tokyo and Nagoya University may have finally brought an end to the debate.

3D scanning. Often used to study dinosaur footprints, these color-coded depth maps enabled the researchers to thoroughly investigate the structure of the Tully monster and other fossils from Mazon Creek.

© 2023 Tomoyuki Mikami

The team studied more than 150 fossilized Tully monsters and over 70 other varied animal fossils from Mazon Creek. With the aid of a 3D laser scanner, they created color-coded, three-dimensional maps of the fossils which showed the tiny irregularities which existed on their surface through color variation. X-ray micro-computed tomography (which uses X-rays to create cross sections of an object so that a 3D model can be created), was also used to look at its proboscis (an elongated organ located in the head). This 3D data showed that features previously used to identify the Tully monster as a vertebrate were not actually consistent with those of vertebrates.

Although the researchers are confident from this study that the Tully monster was not a vertebrate, the next step of the investigation will be to answer what group of organisms it does belong to, possibly a nonvertebrate chordate (like a fishlike animal known as a lancelet) or some sort of protostome (a diverse group of animals containing, for example, insects, roundworms, earthworms and snails) with radically modified morphology.

Problematic fossils like the Tully monster highlight the challenge of piecing together the dynamic history of Earth and the diverse organisms that have inhabited it.

Sadly, the team's paper is behind an expensive paywall. However, the abstract is freely available:

Abstract

Tullimonstrum gregarium, also known as the Tully monster, is a well-known phylogenetic enigma, fossils of which have been found only in the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte. The affinities of Tullimonstrum have been debated since its discovery in 1966, because its peculiar morphology with stalked eyes and a proboscis cannot easily be compared with any known animal morphotypes. Recently, the possibility that Tullimonstrum was a vertebrate has attracted much attention, and it has been postulated that Tullimonstrum might fill a gap in the fossil record of early vertebrates, providing important insights into vertebrate evolutionary history. With the hope of resolving this debate, we collected 3D surface data from 153 specimens of Tullimonstrum using a high-resolution laser 3D scanner and conducted x-ray micro-computed tomographic (μCT) analysis of stylets in the proboscis. Our investigation of the resulting comprehensive 3D morphological dataset revealed that structures previously regarded as myomeres, tri-lobed brain, tectal cartilages and fin rays are not comparable with those of vertebrates. These results raise further doubts about its vertebrate affinities, and suggest that Tullimonstrum may have been either a non-vertebrate chordate or a protostome.

Mikami, T., Ikeda, T., Muramiya, Y., Hirasawa, T. and Iwasaki, W. (2023)
Three-dimensional anatomy of the Tully monster casts doubt on its presumed vertebrate affinities.
Palaeontology, 66: e12646. https://doi.org/10.1111/pala.12646

© 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

It takes a special form of delusion to imagine, with every gap in the scientific knowledge closed in the last couple of hundred years and not found to contain even a trace of a god, that the next one in biology, real or imaginary, will be the one found to contain a god and needing supernatural magic to explain it.

The forlorn hope that the best-supported theory in the entire body of science is going to be abandoned any day now and replaced with the creationist superstition is risible in its childishness. It is almost beyond credibility that there are a significant number of adults who still cling to it.

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