The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 59 Tully Monster
  After the Zhiluojiao Stone Nest Group was defeated, Lin Yi immediately began to investigate the production of the mother cockroaches. Today, there are nearly a hundred reconnaissance queens carrying micro-spies from their nests in various places to the ocean for reconnaissance.

At this time, one of them was resting among a coral reef. A few microscopic torpedo flies were released from the gennaker on the abdomen, and began to hunt under the guidance of the three well-developed compound eyes on the head of the reconnaissance mother.

I caught a few Sakaban turtles at random, clamped them with the three pairs of ancestral chelicerae next to the mouth, and put them into the genetically modified mouthparts to start chewing.

But at this moment, in the huge compound eye at the front of the head, a figure that looked like a Sakaban turtle, but was a little weird, flashed past.

The shape of the figure was a bit strange, but Lin Yi didn't pay much attention. What he cared about was that the other person's body seemed to be soft overall.

In this era, most cephalopods and fish have hard shells. Those without shells, such as conodonts, don't look like this either. It means that this is at least a species that Lin Yi has never seen before.

The scout mother who was still resting violently swung her five paddling legs, the water jet propulsion system was operating at full strength, her streamlined body accelerated rapidly like a catapult, and she chased forward.

The thing still wanted to escape, dodging left and right flexibly, trying to avoid the pursuit of the investigating mother. But how could Lin Yi do what it wished for. All around, miniaturized torpedoes moved forward with their water-jet propulsion systems running at full speed, blocking the opponent's escape path.

The body of the reconnaissance female flew past with five pairs of paddling legs, and the three pairs of chelicerae next to the mouth stretched out to clamp the opponent's body - the touch was exactly as Lin Yi thought, without a shell and very soft.

A microscopic spy cockroach slowly emerged from the mother cockroach's body, swung its paddling feet forward, and looked at the creature sandwiched under the body by the three pairs of claws of the investigating mother cockroach with a pair of huge compound eyes.

But this look immediately made Lin Yi almost shocked. No creature in this era has such a thing, and it is naturally impossible for him to exist now.

The creature in front of me has a soft eel-shaped body, but it is thicker than the leader's ancient jaw. It also had gill openings similar to those of later lampreys.

But what is striking is that on both sides of its head, there are a pair of stalked eyes like those of later snails, and some are similar to the eyestalks of Anomalocaris, but they are not compound eyes, but the naked eyes of vertebrates.

And this is not the most amazing thing about them - in front of the head, there is a slender tentacle-like structure, and at the front of the tentacle structure, there is a pincer-like pedipalp like a scorpion's pedipalp or a pterygoid horseshoe crab's chelicerae. structure.

There are also several similar tentacles extending from both sides of the head, but extending backward and downward. The tentacles are flat and seem to be structures used for paddling. The tail is also vertically arranged, similar to the tail fin of a fish, indicating that it is better at swimming.

Under this guy's translucent body, a harder structure can be vaguely seen running through the body - the spine.

But this guy's appearance is nothing like a regular vertebrate. It looks like a suture monster with the structures of multiple different creatures pieced together.

And just when Lin Yi was thinking about how this little thing looked quite unique and must be some kind of weird Cambrian relic that had never been discovered by later generations, the non-existent smile in his heart gradually solidified.

Nothing else, just because this thing has not only been discovered, but is also quite famous, and has a famous nickname - the first of the three monsters of ancient creatures.

These three monsters are the Tully Monster, the Typhon Monster and the Neyek Worm, and the weirdest and most unidentifiable one among them is the Tully Monster, which is the one now appearing in front of Lin Yi. The so-called monsters refer to species that have never been found with similar morphology, and no possible ancestors or possible descendants have been found, and they seem to appear out of thin air in the strata.

Among them, Typhon has been proven to be a gastropod mollusk, while Neyekia is believed to be a primitive cephalopod. Only the Tully monster's true identity has not yet been determined.

There are thousands of fossils of the Tully Monster in later generations, which shows that it cannot be a fossil with a weird shape caused by problems such as extrusion and deformation caused by geological activities, but that it was born like this.

In the more than sixty years since this thing was discovered and Lin Yi traveled through time, the debate about the true identity of the Tully monster has never stopped.

Molluscs, arthropods, vertebrates, annelids, almost bilaterian animals have all been classified, and eventually the scope was narrowed down to molluscs and vertebrates, but it is still not determined what they are.

Call it a mollusk, but it has the unique characteristics of vertebrates - notochord and gill sacs. The melanosome morphological layering in the eyes is also a layered structure unique to vertebrates.

But if we say it is a vertebrate, it does not have structures such as ear capsules or lateral lines, and it does not even leave any vestigial remnants. And most importantly, the Tully monster's notochord passes between the eyes, while the notochord of normal vertebrates is connected to the back of the brain.

This is related to the arrangement and distribution of nerves and brain structures, which are not easy to change. It may mean that the notochord of Tully Monster is not homologous to vertebrates.

But none of this was what shocked Lin Yi the most. What surprised him the most was that the Tully monster was obviously found in the Carboniferous strata, and logically could not have appeared in the Ordovician.

And this creature at least looks like a Tully monster. Compared with the fossils discovered later, it has a few more tentacles, or fins.

The arrangement of these fins is close to the head, and the arrangement also has the faint shadow of cephalopod brachiopods, which is far from the fins or limbs of vertebrates - if the Tully monster fossils discovered later are just a version, maybe they are would be identified as a mollusk.

But compared with their cephalopod relatives, they are also slightly different - there is no funnel outside the body, and there is no horny beak structure. The mouth is directly connected to the forward raised tentacles, and the middle of the tentacles seems to be an esophagus-like structure.

And the last and most crucial thing is that this Tully monster also has traces of endoskeleton in its tentacles.

But Lin Yi still feels that they are more likely to be highly specialized mollusks than vertebrates, and their endoskeletons may be the result of some kind of convergent evolution.

Based on morphological speculation, Tully monsters and other cephalopods may have separated in the Cambrian.

And he didn't know what the Tully monsters had experienced during the period from the Cambrian to the Carboniferous, which resulted in no fossil records being left behind.

Why they evolved into this appearance step by step, and then evolved into even stranger structures in the following nearly 200 million years, Lin Yi didn't know. But once again he was impressed by the complexity of evolution and the biodiversity of this weird and crazy era.

(End of this chapter)