"The Shadow Out of Time" is easily my favourite of Lovecraft's mythos stories precisely because of the Yithians. The appendages being evolved radulae is excellent, but I could imagine them simply being tentacles akin to gastropods optical/sensory stalks. Perhaps the "trumpet" is a radula, the "graspers" are evolved sensory tentacles, & the "globe" is a general optical/olfactory/auditory organ. This would fit nicely with gastropods stalks having different functions.

The cool thing about Lovecraft's more comprehensible monsters is that the way he portrays them still leaves room for interpretation while still being accurate to the creatures description. Some illustrations, for example, of Elder Things look absolutely silly while others look really cool and menacing, but they still both follow the correct descriptions.

I love all of Sandy of Cthulhu’s videos!

The very thought of a mollusk implanting its brain into a human body is giving me flashbacks to that Invader Zim episode where Zim puts a squid brain into a policeman. The squid has difficult time adjusting to its new body.

"Enormous gulfs, enormous glyphs, enormous galleries, Fragmented visions of a nightmare city Full of cone-shaped beings and me"

Great work on the science here, probably even close to worthy of a lower-end Yithian.

Sandy I love your scientific takes on fantastic subjects

I like that you can just talk about stuff. It's nice.

Wow, awesome timing on this video, I am actually currently in the process of re-reading The Shadow Out of Time and this gave some great context. Love your Lovecraft breakdowns (and Quake stuff)!

Was that picture at the beginning from the Thanksgiving Point dinosaur museum? When I was young my parents took me there at least once a year because of my love for dinosaurs

I always loved the concept of how The Great Race of Yith transfers their consciousnesses, and it made me wonder what exactly they must be. I have a hard time even putting it into words, but it really makes me wonder if, in a way, in this story a being's "soul" if you will, exists and can be pulled from one's body. Following that same train of thought, it makes one wonder what any of us "are". It brings into question, where do these souls come from, that inhabit our bodies...? Is it as simple as, life forming to fill a vessel? In a scientific world it's very interesting how Lovecraft seems to combine Science and Spirituality.

Awesome video, Sandy, I love these examinations of Mythos creatures. On another note, I wondered if you have any thoughts on the mixing of the Pulp genre and the Mythos, such as Pulp Cthulhu by Chaosium.

That sounds like a game scenario: Dinosaurs vs Lovecraft's monsters.

Considering just how many classes of molluscs and whole *PHYLA* of marine invertebrates perished during the various mass extinctions you're spoiled for choice with the Yithians. There was even one, can't remember the systematic name right now, which was thought to be sessile but turned out to have probably moved on a large stalklike foot with several specialized appendages on other stalks, some with sensory organs.

Love your videos sandy a comprehensive guide to the elder things would be awsome there one of my favorite alien species in the series.

sea pangolins (minus the iron sulfide shell)

I think the "as much plant as animals" is referring to the fact that they kind of resemble plants. Like some kind of pitcher plant or those weird fat trees you see in Africa.

The Yithians have always been my favourites in the mythos. I remember the first time i saw one. It was on the cover page to your Field guide to Cthulhu monsters. I was amazed instantaneously and that later led me to start reading Lovecraft, so thank you Mr. Petersen. Sadly i have not found much of your amazing artworks online. I have searched fore the cover paintings to the classic Mansion of Madness, Cthulhu now and Arkham Horror board-game, without any added texts. But have been unable to find them. Are they available somwhere? But thanks again fore leading me to Lovecrafts amazing works.

Would like to see an RTS based on Lovecraft's mythos. Where Yithians would shower the enemy with electric blasts and perhaps magnetic weapons. Slow infantry. Poor melee capabilities. Powerful weapons and abilities. Good at entrenching themselves with teleportation infrastructure and other special abilities to make up for their slow speed. Good naval capabilities. I see it now. Compared to the melee dependent deep ones they have more high tech naval units and powerful weapons while the deep ones have more biological weapons and swarm type armies. I guess abit like Protoss vs Zerg really. Migo would be stealthy. Elder things would have alot of genetically engineered monsters and servant creatures and so on. The mound(Kn'Yanyan) people might feature as a sort of Necromancer faction that uses "Magic" and turns captured humans into undead and maybe breeding stock for their humanoid mounts. I imagine them as pale humanoid elfin creatures with eyeshine and native american symbols. Deep ones would perhaps need human scouts to build the infrastructure necessary to fight on land. Maybe individual kn'yanians would fight like magician warriors like Jedi. Using telekinesis augmented abilities to move fast through the battlefield while being relatively frail if caught in a corner. Humans might feature as a passive race mostly caught in the crossfire. Yeah the Yith seem more like molluscoid deep sea worm things than plants. They do remind me of sessile deep sea worms though. Which is the closest to the "plant" description I think.

I always went with Maxillopods - they have everything, and could easily have an internal test. Barnacles have a massive amount of diversity, they have all the features that are already easy to derive, and they have general cone shapes already; I could easily see a parasitic barnacle that forces some other mollusc to grow into a sheath or shell or even carry it around. We don't have their bones for the same reason we probably won't have a whole lot of modern human fossils - there's just not enough events happening to fossilize a modern human.

There's a way to shoehorn the "as much plant as animal" into it. Symbionts. Lichens are as much fungus as plant. We are almost as much something not animal as animal if you include mitochondria. Or chloroplasts in modern plants. There are aquatic animals which hoover up chloroplasts from what they eat and use them. If an ancestor of the Yithians developed a similar symbiosis it could be grossly animal but part plant at a finer level. And depictions of them as green would make sense

Utah (my home state as well) is fantastic for paleontology. The new Museum of Natural History that used to be on the University of Utah campus was moved to above the campus near Red Rock. It’s a beautiful building with a lot more space and some fantastic displays like what I call “The Wall of Ceratopsians”. The Prehistoric Museum in Price is fantastic and ever growing. They have a couple great displays, one of Utahraptor and one of Gastonia burgeis. Of course it’s not far to the Cleveland quarry, which has updated their site substantially over the past couple of decades. And who can leave out Vernal?

Standing ovation. I had never found sense in Yithians morphology, but by comparing them to molluscs how they move and act becomes intuitive! Thanks, my players will now suffer eeeven more. The joy. :D Just curious, how come the image chosen by a man raised and born in Utah when thinking about eating mussels is a paella? I mean... I know you have been in Spain, but still, you have probably been in just about every western country. As always, eternally greatfull for you Cthulhu rpg book. It roques forte.

I would love if you made a video of the science of Mythos Magic. Just a thought.

Hi Sandy, ever heard of "The Silurian Hypothesis"? It is a scientific theory about a possible civilisation which lived many millions of years ago. So long ago infact that we would not have any trace of them left to find.

You know, having gotten to know many of the sorts of animals that people think of as "non-intelligent", I've still seen some pretty impressive feats -- stuff that your average person certainly wouldn't think was possible. I can at least buy the idea that an octopus could form ideas and solve problems with a level of complexity that's similar to a human. Whether a mollusk's thoughts and a mammal's mind can even be compared in any other way is an entirely different question. As a thought experiment, if it were theoretically possible for me to find a shared language to communicate complex ideas with some theoretical long-lived octopus, even if it was "as intelligent as a human", I'd imagine that I still wouldn't understand whatever ideas it had to share -- any more than it would understand the sorts of thoughts I could come up with. At best, maybe we'd both understand each other's concept of "food".

Your skill in science - biology is 99….gain 1d6 San.

Are there any Call of Cthulhu adventures with the Yith?

❤

I always took the quote "The bodies occupied by the Great Race represented no surviving-or even scientifically known-line of terrestrial evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic type inclining as much to the vegetable as to the animal state." to mean that the Great Race was neither of the kingdom Plantae nor the kingdom Animalia not that it was half plant. At the time scientific consensus was that fungi were a type of plants so that is why he did not mention 'em. It was known however, that the last common ancestor of plants and animals was signal cellular so I believe that Lovecraft was implying that the same is true for Yithians. I do not know if that holds up to scrutiny though.

Are those models on the top left hand shelves Bugs from starship troopers?

Have you done a video on the Mi-Go? If not I hope you do.

Very fascinating. And extremely informative. But how did the Zoogs evolve?

8:25 Darwin was insane and stupid bruh. His whole theory of evolution was based on birds of the same kind, from the Galapagos, having slightly different beaks. He killed birds to avenge worms because he liked worms, and he eventually renounced the idea of God because he refused to believe that God would let birds feed on worms. He dropped out of college two times and never graduated or even joined a biology university. He came up with a theory that eventually was refuted by scientific evidence, and he himself admitted that if irreducible complexity were to be found, his theory would collapse, and low and behold DNA, RNA, carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids. The only education he didn't flunk was geography if i recall correctly. Long story short he has no place anywhere near Newton and Einstein who, not only actually discovered something, they broke ground in science in historical proportions. Darwin is just a saint of atheists and evolution from molecule to man, a state-protected religion, that actual observable and provable science dismantles on every point. Even evolutionists today have to agree Darwin was wrong on most accounts to stay relevant and "credible"

Has anyone ever told you what a terrible game designer you are? You single handedly ruined both Doom and Quake.