Creatures Caves

Or what on albia, I guess.

I was raising a pair of norns, a male kai and a female scorpio, down by the water wheel in the jungle. I went to inject a food vendor, that official cheese vendor that looks kind of like johnny bravo. There was an error message, and the scorpio norn was teleported to the incubator where the vendor should have been. Her name was greyed out on the menu and I could no longer select her from there, or by clicking the next norn button. I went back to the kai down in the jungle, and the scorpio appeared underground there (roughly below where she'd disappeared from) and flickered between there and a spot to the left, where all her sprite parts were spread all over the place quite a distance. She did this for a minute before I tried removing the cob, which removed her from the world without a trace.

I hatched another random norn to test (turned out to be a golden desert), selected her and injected the cob again, and again the norn 'became' the cob somehow, but didn't do the thing with the sprites being chucked all over the floor, then the game crashed.

Restarted, and unfortunately the last save was after the scorpio disappeared but before the new norn became one with the vendor, looks like my kai has a golden desert mate now. What happened here? How do I fix it?