drferox:

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.

You know you love it.

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