Time to warm up those thumbs, denizens of Bonner County! Today’s article will be a glance into Earth’s weird evolutionary past — and to get the full picture, you’re going to want to search Google Images for some of these wacky critters.
Earth has had a pretty wild evolutionary track record. The flora and fauna we see today took roughly a billion years to become what they are now. Diving deep into Earth’s evolutionary history provides a peek into some really weird adaptations that were likely well optimized for their time. Now they’re just bizarre to say the least.
Tullimonstrum
Leading the pack is a creature that has befuddled biologists and paleontologists for nearly a century. Tullimonstrum is a beast straight out of the 2008 video game Spore. It had an elongated, fish-like body, stalked eyes like a snail and a jawed mouth at the end of a proboscis. It existed roughly 319 million years ago in the shallow seas over what is now the state of Illinois.
The Tullimonstrum. Courtesy image
During the Carboniferous period, over 300 million years ago, much of what would become the eastern United States was underwater. Though not connected to Tullimonstrum in any way, it’s interesting to note that the Appalachian Mountains at that time were of comparable size to today’s Himalayas. Much of what would become the United States was a very tropical region at that time, with dense vegetation and peat swamps that created ideal conditions for coal to form from decaying plant matter over millions of years.
Aside from vaguely knowing what Tullimonstrum probably looked like, we know virtually nothing else about it. We don’t know what it ate or how it ate, breathed or reproduced. All we really know is that it looked extremely weird and that it had no bones. Given that it didn’t have any calcium carbonate present in its body, it’s very impressive that we’ve managed to find fossils of Tullimonstrum at all.
Escumasia
One of my favorite jokes from the greatest mockumentary of all time, Parks and Recreation, is: “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” In the case of Escumasia, it was a sea anemone designed by a committee, all simultaneously playing pin the tail on the donkey.
This creature likely resembled modern sea anemones in some ways, such as being a relatively stationary form of sea life with prehensile appendages. Escumasia was shaped like a Y, with two arms, or so paleontologists think.
Escumasia. Courtesy image.
The strangest thing about Escumasia isn’t the fact that it looked weird and had arms but no bones, but the fact that it had a full digestive tract, including an anus, and was bilateral, which means it very likely wasn’t actually related to sea anemones at all.
Scientists don’t really know what Escumasia ate, as its arms lack adaptations for catching prey. Its developed digestive system means that it must have been a fairly advanced creature that ate something, but we have absolutely no idea what that may have been.
It likely lived within the same window as Tullimonstrum, but may have missed its neighbor in the Mazon Creek formation by up to 8 million years.
Proarticulata
This section isn’t about a single animal, but about an entire phylum of critters that essentially defined the Cambrian and early Devonian periods. Earth was in a really weird “getting to know myself” phase during the Cambrian period. Life was bizarre and nonsensical, and creatures from Proarticulata exemplified this perfectly.
Creatures of Proarticulata looked like trilobites, but also kind of like a fleshy bathroom rug that wafted around the ocean floor. They appeared to have segmented bodies, but interestingly enough, they weren’t actually symmetrical like most life is today. They had strange rib-like segments on their bodies called isomers that weren’t symmetrical, but may have wrapped themselves around a single point. This allowed them to glide through the water similarly to modern rays, though they aren’t related at all.
Proarticulata. Courtesy photo
Proarticulata seems to have absolutely no descendants living today. They were an evolutionary dead end, evolved precisely to fill a niche at a very specific time in Earth’s prehistory.
As far as the fossil record shows, they lacked the ability to hunt larger prey, perhaps feeding on whatever happened to waft their way. It’s likely they fed off algae and hoovered around the ocean floor like a Cambrian Roomba.
Life on Earth has always had periods of incredible strangeness. Something that has always stuck with me is the law of the conservation of mass: Matter cannot be created or destroyed, it simply changes shape. That means it’s likely that at some point, some of the atoms that make up who you are now were also atoms that were a part of something wacky like Escumasia.
Just imagine the weird creatures you may have been a part of that we don’t even know about because they didn’t fossilize.
Stay curious, 7B.
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