On the Neurobiology and Endocrinology of Some Prehistoric Coelenterates, XXVI

The Golden Age of Vermin, as paleontologists are accustomed to style the last years of the Ordovician Era, was accompanied by a dramatic (some would say tragic) population explosion in numerous species of fresh-water polyps, the largest of which was Hydra phobia, the Great Cowardly Hydra. These gargantuan beings once constituted a serious menace to navigation in the Normal Sea, a vast prehistoric lake which is currently occupied by Kansas but was then teeming with life.

The Great Cowardly Hydra possessed no power of locomotion, a fact which undoubtedly contributed to its paranoid behavior. As it seldom failed to reach a height of fifty feet at maturity,¹ its dietary requirements were comparable to those of a modern hippopotamus. Fortunately it was totally omnivorous.² Unfortunately, being unable to move about, it never got anything to eat except in the rare case of a passing Graposaurus lying down beside it and going to sleep for ten or twenty years. On the other hand, any trilobite or sea urchin could swim along and take a bite out of a Great Cowardly Hydra.

Although it must be admitted that much of our clinical knowledge of H. phobia is conjectural, unexpected confirmation is supplied by one of its present-day descendants, the Moldavian jackal (Johannes albertus), one of the most cowardly of carnivores. But some authorities, notably Starfishson, reverse this genealogy, claiming H. phobia to be descended from the Moldavian jackal.³ There have also been reports of fossilized hydra feces in Moldavia, near the site of the famous Moldavian Mammoth.⁴

Notes

1. See Yuzz, H. and Wum, R., Statistical Frequency Tables for Prehistoric Coelenterates, The Progressive Actuary, IX, 201–287. It should however be noted that H. phobia frequently failed to reach maturity.
2. See Crocker, B., Manual of Industrial Garbage Disposal (Minneapolis, General Mills Propaganda Div., 1950).
3. See Starfishson, Robert Louis, The Strange Case of Dr. Jackal and Mr. Hydra, Popular Atavist, XXI, 29–33.
4. In 1839 the perfectly preserved carcass of a wet woolly mammoth was discovered in a tar-pit near Blsczt in Moldavia. The discovery aroused great excitement in scientific circles in consequence of what the mammoth had evidently been doing at the time it blundered into the tar-pit.