Anyone else remember playing the Legend of Zelda as a kid and being seriously spooked by those hand monsters that would drop from the ceiling, Wallmasters I think they were called? I hated them back then, but I kind of love them now, and that’s what I was thinking of when a ‘Disembodied hand monster’ was requested for this Fantasy Biology post.
Most fantasy species are at least superficially similar to a real, living or extinct species from which to draw inspiration and scientific understanding. A ‘hand’ that crawls around on its own, eh, not so much.
Unless we stretch what we know of biology quite a bit.
Viewing our hand monster from the outside, which is really all we have to start with, we find five limbs (fingers and thumb) and a body (the palm and wrist in some cases). Even if you consider the ‘thumb’ to be some sort of tail-like-limb, it doesn’t really resemble the anatomy of any vertebrate species. It’s barely even bilaterally symmetrical, it’s actually closer to radial symmetry.
And the Earth does have a handful of radially symmetrical creatures. The jellyfish and anemone being some.
Yes, I’m going to argue that the Hand Monster is some sort of very distantly evolved land jellyfish.
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