Found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of
wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of
unknown marine radiata.
Tissue evidently preserved by mineral salts.
Tough as leather, but astonishing flexibility
retained in places.
Marks of broken-off parts at ends and around
sides.
Six feet end to end, three and five-tenths
feet central diameter, tapering one foot at each end.
Like a barrel with five bulging ridges in
place of staves.
Lateral breakages, as of thinnish stalks,
are at equator in middle of these ridges.
In furrows between ridges are curious growths
- combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans.
All greatly damaged but one, which gives
almost seven-foot wing spread.
Arrangements reminds one of certain monsters
of primal myth, especially fabled Elder Things in Necronomicon.
Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance
to certain creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence
outside antarctic becomes inevitable.
Bryer and Pabodie have read Necronomicon
and seen Clark Ashton Smith's nightmare paintings based on text, and will
understand when I speak of Elder Things supposed to have created all earth
life as jest or mistake.
Students have always thought conception
formed from morbid imaginative treatment of very ancient tropical radiata.
Also like prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth
has spoken of - Cthulhu cult appendages, etc.
Strange barrel growth is the Archaean thing
that left prints on rocks.
"Objects are eight feet long all
over.
Six-foot, five-ridged barrel torso three
and five-tenths feet central diameter, one foot end diameters.
Dark gray, flexible, and infinitely tough.
Cannot yet assign positively to animal or
vegetable kingdom, but odds now favor animal.
Probably represents incredibly advanced
evolution of radiata without loss of certain primitive features.
Echinoderm resemblances unmistakable despite
local contradictory evidences.
Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible
with instruments hardly able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the little
that was achieved left us all awed and bewildered.
Existing biology would have to be wholly
revised, for this thing was no product of any cell growth science knows
about.
There had been scarcely any mineral replacement,
and despite an age of perhaps forty million years the internal organs were
wholly intact.
The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost
indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing's form of
organization, and pertained to some paleogean cycle of invertebrate evolution
utterly beyond our powers of speculation.
It looked like a radiate, but was clearly
something more.
It was partly vegetable, but had three-fourths
of the essentials of animal structure.
That it was marine in origin, its symmetrical
contour and certain other attributes clearly indicated; yet one could not
be exact as to the limit of its later adaptions.
HEAD
At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter
gray, with gill-like suggestions, holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped
apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colors.
Head thick and puffy, about two feet point
to point, with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each
point. Slit in exact center of top probably breathing aperture.
At end of each tube is spherical expansion
where yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised
globe, evidently an eye.
Five slightly longer reddish tubes
start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head and end in saclike swellings
of same color which, upon pressure, open to bell-shaped orifices two inches
maximum diameter and lined with sharp, white tooth-like projections
-probably mouths.
All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish
head, found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck
and torso.
Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness.
Bulbous light-gray pseudoneck, without gill
suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed starfish arrangement.
From inner angles of starfish arrangements
project two-foot reddish tubes tapering from three inches diameter at base
to one at tip.
Orifices at tips.
All these parts infinitely tough and leathery,
but extremely flexible.
TORSO
Around equator, one at central apex of each
of the five vertical, stave-like ridges are five systems of light gray
flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible
to maximum length of over three feet.
HANDS
Like arms of primitive crinoid.
Single stalks three inches diameter branch
after six inches into five sub-stalks, each of which branches after eight
inches into small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a
total of twenty-five tentacles.
Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly
used for locomotion of some sort, marine or otherwise.
When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated
muscularity.
As found, all these projections tightly
fold over pseudoneck and end of torso, corresponding to projections at
other end.
FEET
At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly
functioning counterparts of head arrangements exist.
Tough, muscular arms four feet long
and tapering from seven inches diameter at base to about two and five-tenths
at point.
To each point is attached small end of a
greenish five-veined membranous triangle eight inches long and six wide
at farther end.
This is the paddle, fin, or pseudofoot which
has made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million
years ago.
WINGS
In furrows between ridges are curious growths
- combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans.
All greatly damaged but one, which gives
almost seven-foot wing spread.
"Their wings seem to be membranous,
stretched on frame work of glandular tubing. Apparent minute orifices
in frame tubing at wing tips.
Seven-foot membranous wings of same color,
found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework
tubular or glandular, of lighter gray, with orifices at wing tips.
Spread wings have serrated edge.
Wing structure puzzles in view of probable
marine habitat, but may have use in water navigation.
Symmetry is curiously vegetablelike, suggesting
vegetable's essential up-and-down structure rather than animal's fore-and-aft
structure.
Fabulously early date of evolution, preceding
even simplest Archaean protozoa hitherto known, baffles all conjecture
as to origin.
INTERNAL ORGANS
It was not blood, but a thick, dark-green
fluid apparently answering the same purpose.
All guesses about its external members had
been correct, and on the evidence of these one could hardly hesitate to
call the thing animal; but internal inspection brought up so many vegetable
evidences that Lake was left hopelessly at sea.
It had digestion and circulation, and eliminated
waste matter through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped base.
Cursorily, one would say that its respiratory
apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide; and there were odd
evidences of air-storage chambers and methods of shifting respiration from
the external orifice to at least two other fully developed breathing
systems - gills and pores.
Clearly, it was amphibian and probably adapted
to long airless hibernation periods as wall.
Vocal organs seemed present in connection
with the main respiratory system.
Articulate speech, in the sense of syllable
utterances, seemed barely conceivable, but musical piping notes covered
a wide range were highly probable.
The muscular system was almost prematurely
developed.
The nervous system was so complex
and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast. though excessively
primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing had a set of ganglial
centers and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialized development.
Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced,
and there were signs of a sensory equipment, served in part through the
wiry cilia of the head, involving factors alien to any other terrestrial
organism.
Probably it has more than five senses, so
that its habits could not be predicted from any existing analogy.
It must, Lake thought, have been a creature
of keen sensitiveness and delicately differentiated functions in its primal
world - much like the ants and bees of today.
It reproduced like the vegetable cryptograms,
especially the Pteridophyta, having spore cases at the tips of the wings
and evidently developing from a thallus or prothallus.
