One small event made Francis Tully’s life extraordinary.
Almost 70 years ago, the Texaco pipe fitter and amateur explorer found something inside a rock previously unseen by humans. The rust-colored rock, or nodule, held inside it a small creature that had been hidden away for millions of years.
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“When you’re hunting fossils, you’re looking for just anything at all,” Tully told Tribune reporter Peter Gorner in 1987. “The kick is to find something nobody has found before. Then, the idea is to share the things with others. That’s why I seldom have sold any. I trade them off or give ’em away.”
What Tully and geologists long had known is something many Chicagoans don’t — just about 50 miles south of the city is one of the world’s great fossil beds. Mazon Creek, south of Morris, was once home to the Sea of Illinois, part of a warm, shallow saltwater estuary that stretched across much of the Midwest about 90 million years before the first dinosaurs. Its lush trees and swamps were the perfect environment for fossil preservation for the many plants and animals that lived there — especially invertebrates (creatures without backbones). And since part of the area near Braidwood had been strip-mined by coal companies during the early 20th century, giant piles of soft shale provide a gold mine for fossil fanatics.
Tully’s discovery baffled scientists, who eventually christened the creature after the Lockport resident. Tully’s monster was recognized as the official state fossil of Illinois 35 years ago this week, but the designation did not come without hiccups along the way — and, unfortunately, arrived too late for its staunchest advocate to celebrate.
Summer 1955: ‘I’d never seen anything like it’
“I found two rocks that had cracked open from natural weathering,” Tully told the Tribune about his major discovery near Mazon Creek. “They held something completely different. I knew right away. I’d never seen anything like it. None of the books had it. I’d never seen it in museums or at rock clubs. So I brought it to the Field Museum to see if they could figure out what the devil it was.”
Jan. 7, 1966: Richardson’s paper names ‘wormlike fossil’
When Tully brought the specimen to the Field Museum, its experts confessed they didn’t know what it was.
“We could not even decide which phylum to put it in,” Eugene S. Richardson Jr., then curator of fossil invertebrates, later wrote. “And that was a serious and embarrassing matter.”
A decade later, Richardson decided the creature finally needed a name. In an excerpt published in Nature, Richardson merely Latinized what everyone was calling the thing, anyway: Tullimonstrum gregarium — Tully monster, common.
“I was very pleased,” Tully told the Tribune about the name in 1986. “Darn right.”
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1987: ‘This is not Russia, it’s Illinois’
The so-called monster that once inhabited swamps in Will, Kankakee and Fulton counties was now considered for the state’s official fossil.
“I don’t believe there are a series of fossils of the import to the state like the Tully monster,” said Rep. Helen Satterthwaite ,D-Champaign, who sponsored the bill.
The Tully monster, though mysterious, put Illinois on the map for fossil hunters, Illinois State Museum curator of geology Richard Leary told the Tribune in March 1987.
“Everybody, from housewives to plastic surgeons to nuns to small children, wanted their own Tully,” he said.
The Illinois Senate voted 49-4 in June 1987 to allow the state’s schoolchildren to decide. But that matter turned into, well, another monster.
Gov. James Thompson planned to veto the resolution in September 1987, saying he didn’t want a stacked election for the official state fossil.
“It’s either yes or no on the Tully monster. That’s un-American,” Thompson said. “That’s how they run elections in Russia. This is not Russia, it’s Illinois.”
Unfortunately, Tully didn’t live long enough to see if his incredible find would be honored at the state level. He died days before Thompson’s comment.
Aug. 31, 1989: Designation accomplished
After an almost two-year delay, Gov. Thompson finally signed legislation making the Tully monster the official state fossil in Illinois.
March 16, 2016: Surprise, it’s a vertebrate! Or, is it?
Much as the people of Metropolis wondered whether Superman flying overhead was a bird or a plane, scientists have struggled to classify the Tully monster. Its fossil shows traits associated with several disparate animal types and such abnormalities as eyes mounted on an external bar and a long, toothy proboscis.
“If you put in a box a worm, a mollusk, an arthropod and a fish, and you shake, then what you have at the end is a Tully monster,” Carmen Soriano, a paleontologist at Argonne National Laboratory, told the Tribune in 2016.
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Using the synchrotron X-ray machine at Argonne and the Field Museum’s collection of 2,000 Tully specimens, a team announced in the journal Nature that, “The Tully monster is a vertebrate.” It was one of two papers the publication published that year stating Tully monsters are vertebrates.
But just a year later, another study published in Palaeontology said the fossils are not vertebrates.
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