The Tully Monster is So Weird, It’s Hard to Draw

The Tully Monster, Tullymonstrum gregarium, is an extinct creature from about 300 million years ago (That’s tens of millions of years before there were dinosaurs). It looks like a squid, has a single arm — elbow and all — and has a spinal cord, completely unlike a cephalopod.

It’s insanely weird.

The Tully Monster

So, naturally, I decided to draw it. The problem is, it’s so weird, every reconstruction of it looks wrong. Its eyes, if those are, indeed, eyes, point straight out to the sides on sticks. It has a single nostril in the front, but lots of little vents along its sides that don’t run down the centerline. The jaws of its pincer/mouth don’t seem to meet, but instead make this cartoonish sneer shape.

Go home, evolution. You’re drunk.

You can read more about it, if you wanna, but it’s not going to help you understand. Just know that it has the name gregarium because there were huge numbers of them.

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In particular, thanks to Jason Godesky’s Fifth World, a shared world and RPG about humans getting their shit together 400 years after modern civilization collapses. It’s beautiful.

The only Solarpunk RPG I've ever seen.

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