From
Wikipedia:
The State of Illinois, the 21st state admitted to the United States of America, is the most populous and demographically diverse Midwestern state and the fifth most populous state in the nation. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and western Illinois, and natural resources like coal, timber, and petroleum in the south, Illinois has a broad economic base. Illinois is an important transportation hub; the Port of Chicago connects the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River via the Illinois River. Illinois is often viewed as a microcosm of the United States; an Associated Press analysis of 21 demographic factors found Illinois the "most average state", while Peoria has long been a proverbial social and cultural bellwether.
Approximately 66% of the population of Illinois resides in the northeastern corner of the state, primarily within the city of Chicago and the surrounding metropolitan areas.
The U-Haul graphic for Illinois is titled "Tully Monster" - Equatorial Creatures in Grundy County. The text of the Illinois U-Haul Graphic reads as follows and is posted on the U-Haul website:
Did you know? llinois once lay near the equator on the supercontinent of Pangea and was home to unique creatures. How did the strip mining of Illinois' coal deposits reveal the secret of the Tully Monster? Learn more about the time when Illinois was at the equator at...
From Wikipedia:
The Tully Monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium), so far apparently unique to Illinois, USA, was a soft-bodied invertebrate that lived in shallow tropical coastal waters of muddy estuaries during the Pennsylvanian geological period, about 300 million years ago. The term 'monster' relates to the creature's outlandish appearance and strange body plan, rather to its size: fossil specimens are mostly less than 20cm in length
The Tully Monster had a pair of fins not unlike a cuttlefish at the tail end of its body, and possibly vertical fins as well (though the fidelity of preservation of fossils of its soft body makes this difficult to determine), and a long proboscis with eight small sharp teeth with which it may have probed actively for small creatures and edible detritus in the muddy bottom. A stalk protruding from either side of the lower forward body may have had an eye or other sensory organ at its tip, but this is speculative. It was part of the ecological community represented in the unusually rich group of soft-bodied organisms found among the assemblage called the Mazon Creek fossils from their site in Grundy County, Illinois.
The formation of the Mazon Creek fossils is unusual. When the creatures died, they were rapidly buried in silty outwash. The bacteria that began to decompose the plant and animal remains in the mud produced carbon dioxide in the sediments around the remains. The carbon dioxide combined with iron from the groundwater around the remains, forming encrusting nodules of siderite ('ironstone'), which created a hard permanent 'cast' of the animal which slowly further decayed, leaving a carbon film on the cast.
The combination of rapid burial and rapid formation of siderite resulted in excellent preservation of the many animals and plants that ended up in the mud. As a result, the Mazon Creek fossils are one of the world's major Lagerstätten, or concentrated fossil assemblages. Amateur collector Francis Tully found the first of these fossils in 1958. He took the strange creature to the Field Museum, but paleontologists remain stumped as to what phylum Tullimonstrum belongs to. In 1989 Tullimonstrum gregarium was officially designated the State Fossil of Illinois.
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