There was also an ominous line that it is also found in CancerWEB's On-line Medical Dictionary.

Sounds like what happens when a cancer metastasizes spreading the maglignancy throughout the body. Just a guess.

Actually I thought a "hypocratermorphous" is what happened to wooly mammoths when they fell into a tar pit, eventually morphing into fossilized remains. [Guess not.]

This is new to me - "metastasis" can be used metaphorically:

metastasis

n. Rhetoric, change of subject; movement to another part of body of agent causing disease; archaic, metabolism. metastasize, v.i. metastatic, a.

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/difficultwords/data/d0008235.html