Lovecraft introduced Cthulhu, a bizarre tentacled monster of unknown origin resting on the bottom of the sea, in his 1926 short story The Call of Cthulhu, where he describes it as, 'a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.' The anatomical features reconstructed in 3D by the paleontologists reveal that Sollasina belongs to the ophiocistioidea, a class of extinct echinoderms from the Palaeozoic and early Mesozoic, most closely related to modern sea cucumbers. Lovecraft of his creature Cthulhu (pronounced 'kuh-THOO-loo'), that they named the new species they described in a recently published scientific article as Sollasina cthulhu.

Elissa Martin, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural HistoryĪn exceptionally-preserved fossil of a 430 million-year-old tentacled sea creature reminded an international team of paleontologists so much of the description given by American science-fiction and horror author H.P. An artist's rendition of Sollasina cthulhu, a new fossil species named after H.P.

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