What the Hell is Tullimonstrum?! 

The weirdest thing about this thing is the period it lived in. I mean, if you said it's from the Burgess Shale, I'd just go "oh, another weird Cambrian early metazoan", but the Tullimonstrum is far younger, meaning it has to either be related to some of the modern animal phyla, or an example of a very long ghost lineage.

A while ago I showed a picture of a Tully monster to my cousin and she burst out laughing uncontrollably. Apparently she finds the cute little guy funny.

I just realized this creature looks like it literally came directly out of spore

I love that this real-life prehistoric animal is more alien than the goddamn blue cat people from Alpha Centauri in Avatar.

This is truly the most mind bending and weird actual creature I have ever seen. I have been admiring it for years for its weirdness and I recall first thinking it was a screenshot from the SPORE computer game where you get to create new creatures and select their features. When you think of it as a type of squid it seems to make a little more sense. While we are used to them a squid is equally weird.

We recently had a dog start at our daycare named "Tullie" and I CANNOT see her/talk about her without thinking about Tullimonstrum, I've started calling her Tully Monster just for that.😂

The platypus: Gods sense of humor The Tully monster: Oh no God got a hold of spore

I love that we've only narrowed it down to "vertibrate"

This is that thing we all made in spore.

My first gut reaction to it when I saw the artist's render was "Some kind of ... proto-mollusk maybe..." specifically because of that body shape. But at the same time, even then, I was thinking "What the hell is with those holes, though?" and I couldn't shake the feeling that the secret to what this thing is related to probably truly hinged on identifying what those hole structures were. As soon as he showed the picture of the lamprey with the same structures on it, I was like "motherf... he's right. It's a cartilagenous vertebrate, beyond a shadow of a doubt!" What's really unsettling to me is how we'd be completely unaware of tullimonstrum if it wasn't for the hyper-absurd levels of sedimentary deposits happening in this specific area, at this specific time in history. It makes me wonder what other truly bizarre forks off of family trees and even, possibly, entire shadow biomes existed on earth but went extinct and are lost to time specifically because they were similarly made of non-fossilizing strangestuff during otherwise entirely typical periods and environments that didn't preserve them like this river did to tullimonstrum.

Cool video. I've always liked Tully's Monster/Tullimonstrum, ever since I first saw it mentioned in a book in my grade school library as a possible candidate for the Loch Ness Monster. Obviously it isn't haunting any modern day Scottish lakes, but it's still a cool and interesting animal, whatever its classification. Thanks for this video!

Hearing about Tullimonstrum reminds me of my nephew reading the Harry Potter stories. He had to wait months and years for the next installment. It’s amazing what they an do with fossils these days. Thinking of this thing as a basal lamprey makes sense but not definitively so. Keep on truckin.

Everyone is asking what is Tullimonstrum but nobody asks how is Tullimonstrum

My favorite "what the hell" guy ever appeared 😍

Really appreciate you explaining the formation. That’s great information

great to have u back i love your style of videos

Some people think because the notochord goes past the eye stalks & down the trunk it should be a stem vertibrate

Amazing if this is a vertebrate. Our long-lost cousin!

BEMMIE!!! (The anatomy of Tullimonstrum is very different from Bemmius, but it still makes me think of *Boundary*.)

awesome vid!

I suspect this was an ocean creature and the reason for the eye stalks is so that it can judge distances better, I would envisage this creature hiding in cracks in the rock etc and waiting for a small fish to swim by when it would snap out with its mouth to eat the creature. The stalks would allow it to judge the distance to the prey better.

Yay!! I *LOVE* the Tully Monster and knew this episode was inevitable

Interesting video, but no size scale was provided. It apparently reached a length of about 35 centimeters.

I didn't think I would find your talk as interesting as I did. It was fascinating!

Dang, Bubba..cut the line,cut the line!!!

Interesting, such a weird creature

The aooalachians used to be taller than the himalayas, no wonder there was that much erosion and sediment deposited.

Basically nature at its finest

Not even completely sure what Phylum?? Nice!

If Tullimonstrum wasn't a vertebrate, he could be a near relative like cephalocordates

Thank you for your videos, very informative! I have a theory that could be plausible with this Tully creature. I have Boulders of this formation with a claw. I was thinking crab, could I email you?

What's the paper at 9:16 from Saro et al. called?

im starting a list of SILLY LITTLE GUYS! bizzare fellas, the full volume Tullymonstrum Opabinia Hallucigenia (feel free to add)

I was waiting for this! Especially whether it was vertebrate or invertebrate still controversy and debate whether it is

Detroit somehow changes everything near it

Would Tullimonstrum root under the sand, or would that proboscis fire out like the lower labia of the dragonfly nymph to catch prey in the water column? Were there different species or genera of Tullimonstrum?

Are Tully monster fossils exclusive to this one single dig site or have they been found anywhere else in the world? It just seems odd that even if it was a vertebrate related to lampreys it could evolve a proboscis shaped jaw and stalked eyes with zero known intermediate phases from anywhere else. That is one massive ghost lineage right there!

What if the eyestalks... are wheels...

Ia this in the backround a real sea scorpion fossil ?

What happened to the hypothesis that Tullymonstrum is a stem lamprey?

Earth Beta was crazy. The post Cambrian Patch really stabilized the evolutionary meta

The spiracles on his side say "I'm a relative of lampreys." Its proboscis says it ate worms. Segmentation is everywhere in the water, because it works. Now, where did this estuary dump into? Where is its source? Perhaps there are other relatives in the fossil record, there, too. I see no reason why humans shouldn't begin mining for fossils. We need to know!

Looks like something I’d make in Spore lmao

It looks like an Ocarina that can clamp to an amplifier. XD

Yay, spinal squid with stalk eyes!

Just so you know, I watch your videos specifically because they're calm, detailed, you don't yell or have weird sound effects, etc. I almost didn't click on that first thumbnail because of the "?!" and the way the title seems kind of clickbait-y. You've marketed this series in a misleading way and I think you're missing viewers because of it. Just taking the exclamation point out might be sufficient, I'm not an expert.

Very interesting. Belated thought - a sufficiently well preserved eye would tell what way up the retina is constructed so definitively say mollusc or vertebrate. FWVLIW: They do look like derived lampreys to me... or maybe the reverse might be more correct.

i don know why it remind me of Sy Snootles, from star wars return of the jedi... :B

😍😍😍🔥🔥

What the hell, indeed, because we have no solid answer to this one yet.

what it was doing? its best probably

It's the platypus of etera. At least it seams that way to me. The platypus tree doesn't branch as well so in my opinion nature likes to mess with us

Mother nature at it's finest 👌

Well this video was pretty great

The ancestor of Petromyzontiformes?🤔

ok before i watch it all, reminds me of a squid, is that an ancestor of modern squids? A vertabrate eyes. interesting.

a thingamabob

Please don't call it a vertebrate. It might be a chordate; it is not a vertebrate.

how the heck that thing is so eww

Interesting subject matter; but I'm tired of you saying, what the hell

Snailfish.

Maybe it used it's proboscis too pull out and eat tube worms

an alien slug. lol.