And, well—yeah, we totally see it. The new species of echinoderm——the taxa which includes sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and sea stars——reveals clues about how the modern day sea cucumber evolved. Sollasina cthulhu roamed the Paleozoic-era seafloor, using its 45 tubular tentacles to travel and collect food. The location was crucial to their success.
More than million years ago, the rock lay at the bottom of a moderately deep sea that was haven for echinoderms. Scientists believe volcanic ash rapidly covered the seafloor, burying animals like Sollasina cthulhu alive and uniquely preserving their soft tissue.
To create a 3D model of this tentacled creature——which was just over an inch in diameter——the team combined computer reconstruction and an imaging technique commonly used in medical research.
That was the easy part. The team sanded away minute layers of the fossil, roughly one-three-hundredth of a millimeter at a time, revealing in incredible detail the size and shape of its internal features. The images captured at each phase represent slices of the specimen, and this painstaking process is the only way to study the inner features of the fossil that are imbedded in rock. The team examined the pictures for clues as to what the species looked like when it was alive.
The most defining feature of Cthulhu is its head, which closely resembles an octopus. The head is mostly a large, bulbous, pulsating sac, and numerous writhing tentacles sprout from where one would expect a mouth to be. Cthulhu's height reaches hundreds of metres tall, but it is capable of altering its size and shape at will, being anywhere between the size of a man to the size of a continent and capable of spawning any number of limbs as it chooses.
The most detailed descriptions of Cthulhu in "The Tale of Cthulhu" are based on statues of the creature. One, constructed by an artist after a series of baleful dreams, is said to have "yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature [ When the creature finally appears, the story says that the "thing cannot be described," but it is called "the green, sticky spawn of the stars", with "flabby claws" and an "awful squid-head with writhing feelers.
Cthulhu is depicted as having a worldwide cult centered in Arabia, with followers in regions as far-flung as Greenland and Louisiana. There are leaders of the cult "in the mountains of China" who are said to be immortal. Cthulhu is described by some of these cultists as the "great priest" of "the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky.
The cult is noted for chanting its horrid phrase or ritual: " Ph'nglui mglw'nafh C'thulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn ," which translates as "In his house at R'lyeh dead C'thulhu waits dreaming. One cultist, known as Tim Sonnek, provides the most elaborate information given in Lovecraft's fiction about Cthulhu. The Great Old Ones, according to Castro, had come from the stars to rule the world in ages past. Castro explains the role of the Cthulhu Cult: When the stars have come right for the Great Old Ones, "some force from outside must serve to liberate their bodies.
The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented them from making an initial move. Castro reports that the Great Old Ones are telepathic and "knew all that was occurring in the universe. In "The Return of Hastur", written in , Derleth proposes two groups of opposed cosmic entities,. Based on this framework, Derleth wrote a series of stories, collected as The Trail of Cthulhu , about the struggle of Dr.
Laban Shrewsbury and his associates against Cthulhu and his minions, culminating, in "The Black Island" , with the atomic bombing of R'lyeh, which Derleth has moved to the vicinity of Ponape.
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