This is Mazon Monday post #199. What's your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:[email protected].
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Today, we have strange, enigmatic tale of the Tully Monster. It's a tale of wonder.... of wonder why it was written and can this be real?
In 1969, the book "The Great Orm of Loch Ness: A Practical Inquiry into the Nature and Habits of Water-monsters" by F.W. Holiday was published by W. W. Norton and Co. It's about the Loch Ness monster and the.... Tully Monster. Having read the description of Tullymonstum gregarium and noting there wasn't a classification for the "beastie", Holiday proposed that the Loch Ness Monster is a giant snail related to the Tullymonstrum. The author F. W. Holiday has a Wikipedia page. He's described as a Journalist and a Cryptozoologist.
Here is a small snippet from the book.
"The panorama was arresting - a magnificent canvas of water, conifer forest, mountains and sky. And then - with no break in the continuity I found myself watching the Great Orm of Loch Ness. The time was almost 6.00 a.m. Some hundreds of feet below the road is an area of flat land bisected by the Foyers River. A leat or water-course left the river, ran for a few hundred yards, and entered the loch almost directly below my position. At the point of entry, the mouth of this leat was about 50 yards wide.
A dozen or so yards into the loch, opposite the leat, an object made a sudden appearance. It was black and glistening and rounded and it projected about three feet above the surface. Instantly, it plunged under again, violently, and produced an enormous upsurge of water. A huge circular wave raced outwards as if from a diving hippopotamus.
The light was ideal and my position was good. Hardly breathing, I stared at the leat with enormous intensity. The water which was sheltered from the breeze by Foyers headland - was flat calm and the binoculars missed nothing.
Just below the surface, I then made out a shape. It was thick in the middle and tapered towards the extremities. It was a sort of blackish-grey in colour. To demonstrate that it was no trick of light-defraction, it moved steadily from one side of the leat to the other and then back again. When a chance puff of wind touched the surface it disappeared in a maze of ripples but when the water stilled it was always there. Its size - judging from the width of the leat - was between 40 and 45 feet long. No details were visible nor did any portion of it again break surface. It was simply an elongated shape of large size moving purposefully to and fro at the edge of deep water."
- F. W. Holiday The Great Orm of Loch Ness
On goodreads, this book gets 4 and 5 stars. One reviewer calls it a "great adventure book" and "Highly enjoyable". Another calls Holiday a "talented travelogue writer, perfectly capturing the atmosphere of the foggy mysterious romance of the Highlands".
Interestingly, Eugene Richardson wrote a review for the London Times. Did Holiday send him a copy? How did he find out? Was he a fan of the Loch Ness monster? Did Holiday have any other books reviewed by such a knowledgeable, distinguished scientist? So many questions....
If you're in need of some reading material to cozy up with during the frigid winter, perhaps The Great Orm of Loch Ness will bring you both warmth and a bit of laughter.
Jim, Tony Sobolik, Sylvia, and Lucy McLuckie in 1963.
It appears Jim and Sylvia became aware of this book, as it was referenced in an article they wrote for Fossil News in February 2010. In their collaborations, Jim typically handled the writing while Sylvia contributed the artwork. This particular article was clearly written with a humorous tone, but it’s interesting because it offers insight into the Tullymonster and the debates surrounding its classification as far back as the 1960s—debates that persist to this day. Is it a vertebrate, or something else? Modern research methods have uncovered more evidence than was available 40 years ago, with some of that evidence now suggesting Tullymonstrum may be a vertebrate (Mazon Monday #161).
The Enigmatic Tully Monster
by Jim and Sylvia Konecny
What in the world is a Tully Monster? In 1958, while hunting fossils encased in ironstone concretions in the abandoned coal strip mines of northern Illinois, a collector by the name of Francis Tully chanced upon some unusual organisms impressed in these concretions.
This region is known as the Mazon Creek Area and its stratigraphic position is Middle Pennsylvanian, the Francis Creek Shale Member of the Carbondale Formation. Not being able to identify his new finds with the literature at hand, be brought them to the attention of George Langford and Dr. Eugene S. Richardson, Jr. at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The fossils immediately became a curiosity and a puzzlement to all who viewed them. Speculations abounded: it's a worm-it's a squid-it's a leech-it's a... and on and on. Dr. Rainer Zangerl, then head of the Geology Department, merely referred to them as Tully's monsters. From the day of its discovery this odd-looking, strangely-shaped creature has been the subject of much debate. To this day, its taxonomic position is uncertain. When Richardson described this unusual beastie (Dr. Richardson's favorite term) in 1966, he did not hazard a placement in either class or phylum. He described it as a wormlike creature and named it Tullimonstrum gregarium, the generic name honoring the finder, Francis Tully. A more detailed description in a subsequent paper by Richardson did nothing to further its identity.
The Tullimonstrum's morphology and affinities were reported by Johnson and Richardson in 1969. Although a more detailed analysis of this strange animal was given, there was still a reluctance for a positive taxonomic placement. They indicated a leaning to one of the worm phyla; however, they showed their true feelings with the following quote: "The name is appropriate in yet another sense: a Norwegian paleontologist has pointed out that tull means 'nonsense' in Norwegian."
In 1979, Dr. Merrill W. Foster took a giant step and placed this poor orphan in the phylum Mollusca. When it came to placing it in a class, he hedged a little bit. He merely suggested that it might belong to one of the gastropod groups. As might be expected, this did not meet with universal approval. It remains the object of much speculation.
The Tully, as it is commonly referred to, has been likened to all sorts of creatures both living and extinct, factual and fictional. The most bizarre relationship was reported in the January 30, 1969 Literary Supplement of the London Times. It is a book review of The Great Orm of Loch Ness by F. W. Holiday. Quotes from this review follow.
"The monster, if such there be, lurking in the depths of Loch Ness has had a very good run for men's money since they began to look for it nearly 40 years ago... The Great Orm of Loch Ness is a good attempt to lift the whole matter to a more rational level and bring it within sight of a reasonable conclusion. Mr. Holiday is an amateur zoologist with a vivid and vigorous pen, a cool head, and a firm grip on the scientific method. He saw a Great Orm in the pre-dawn of a still August morning in 1962: The Loch Ness phenomena Investigation Bureau was formed with American help, and began to operate in the mid-1960s, but with only moderate success.
"In 1966, the watchers had a great stroke of luck when they received from a Chicago museum a paper describing a strange fossil, Tullimonstrum gregarium, which had been dug out of nearby coal deposits in large numbers since 1958. This animal, a segmented worm about one foot long, was so bizarre that the local zoologists had failed to place it in any of the accepted phyla. Yet when the American reconstruction of the animal was compared with a model drawn from the most reliable of the Loch Ness evidence, the similarities-particularly of certain lateral organs whose function was entirely conjectural-were so striking as to leave Mr. Holiday in no doubt that the Great Orm and Tully's Worm were members of the same unknown invertebrate family. The Loch Ness Monster was being turned into a giant worm.
"Having established his hypothetical base, Mr. Holiday turns back to history and becomes a dragon-hunter. Why should we give the Great Orm a purely local habitation when in the past it may have spawned in any of the world's lakes and rivers, and risen from them in forays across land to spread terror and awe in humankind? The author ransacks the folklore and legends of Britain and the Middle East to see how their fiery abominations could be fitted into the Tully-Orm pattern. All of this is highly conjectural. Mr. Holiday (or someone else) has still to capture and study a giant worm, which, after all, has only been seen once or twice on land in one shocking piece. But it looks as if the zoological Establishment may have to think again."
Mr. Holiday's assessment is interesting, to say the least. This leads one to wonder if he is serious in his comparison, or is he just fantasizing? Is his theory as far-fetched as it sounds? This brings us back to our opening sentence. What in the world is a Tully Monster?
The Tully Monster is endemic to Illinois. In fact, to be more precise, it has been found in only three locations- Peabody Coal Company's Pit 11 near Essex; an abandoned mine of the Old Northern Illinois Coal Co. west of Morris commonly referred to as Chowder Flats; and at the Sunspot Mine near Astoria. Appropriately, the Tully Monster has been designated the official state fossil of Illinois.
References
Carman, Mary R, 1989. The monster of Illinois. Rocks and Minerals, Jan-Feb, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 36-41
Foster, Merrill W, 1979. A reappraisal of Tullimonstrum gregarium in Mazon Creek Fossils, Matthew H. Nitecki (ed.), Academic Press.
Johnson, Ralph Gordon and Eugene S. Richardson, Jr. 1969. The morphology and affinities of Tullimonstrum in Pennsylvanian Invertebrates of the Mazon Creek Area, Illinois, Fieldiana Geology, vol. 12, nos. 8-11. Field Museum of Natural History.
Richardson, Eugene S., Jr., 1966a. Wormlike fossil from the Pennsylvanian of Illinois. Science 151 (3706): pp. 75-76.
Richardson, Eugene S., Jr., 1966b. The Tully Monster. Bulletin Field Museum of Natural History 37 (7) July, 3 pp.
Richardson, Eugene S., Jr., 1969. A giant worm? Literary Supplement, London Times. 30 January.
The Fossil News article was sent in by Ralph Jewell. Thanks for the contribution!
Fossil News magazine is published quarterly. They have interesting stories about all things fossil. Check them out!
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