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• Featured Specimen
 The Tully Monster
Mazon Creek near Chicago is one of the world’s best fossil sites, giving scientists an amazing record of life during the Carboniferous Period. And the Field Museum has one of the largest Mazon Creek collections on exhibit anywhere. (To see more of our Mazon Creek specimens, check out the Carboniferous Image Gallery.)
 Part of our collection includes hundreds of specimens of the famous “Tully monster.” Fossil collector Francis Tully discovered this odd marine creature at Mazon Creek in 1958 and brought it to the Field Museum. Scientists were unable to identify it, and nicknamed it the “Tully monster.”
 When Field Museum curator Dr. Eugene Richardson formally described the new animal, he gave it the name Tullimonstrum gregarium. (The species name gregarium means “common.”) Since then, every fossil found of the “Tully monster” has been found in Illinois. It’s become the official Illinois state fossil.
These fossils tell scientists what the Tully monster might have looked like when it lived 300 million years ago. But how did it swim? What did it eat? What are its closest relatives? It’s so unlike other animals, scientists still have questions.
Continue to Permian. >>
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