Abstract
The two quotes above are representative of the controversy concerning the age of Nautilus, the last externally shelled cephalopod. If we accept the first age estimate, we would have to include Nautilus as a living fossil, the end member of a clade that has survived for a long time and undergone little morphologic change.
The genus Nautilus of the Nautiloidae family appeared in the Triassic Period, and its representatives have remained unchanged to this day. It is one of the most remarkable of nature’s living fossils; it has been called, and is, “the Coelocanth of the invertebrates.” (Cousteau and Diole 1973)
At the present, for instance Miller (1951) restricts Nautilus to only the Recent species and all of the Tertiary forms previously assigned to Nautilus are placed in Eutrephoceras or Cimomia. In this interpretation I am in full agreement. (Kümmel 1956)
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Ward, P. (1984). Is Nautilus a Living Fossil?. In: Eldredge, N., Stanley, S.M. (eds) Living Fossils. Casebooks in Earth Sciences. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8271-3_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8271-3_31
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