Family Tree of Cephalopods (with Smilies!)

[cuttlegirl]

Thanks Graeme! I had forgotten all about this thread to tell the truth. It's funny how things rear up from the past at you sometimes.

Apparently this week it's been featured in Pharyngula much to my shock!

Wow, Phil, you are famous!

[peftypefty]

Phil, I just came across this family tree and it's absolutely brilliant. (Can't decide whether I like this one or the creationist one better :))

A few finer points of phylogeny for you, in case you're interested in further modifying this baby:
- Your ceratites seem to spring from within the goniatites, whereas we know pretty clearly that they sprang from within the prolecanites (yeah, I know no one ever uses that word, but I like it).
- Due to a couple of recent discoveries, it's now thought by some that ammonites may have just barely survived the K/Pg boundary. Oh, right, the word "Tertiary" is no longer officially sanctioned either.
- I thought that cuttlefish extended back at least into the Cretaceous. ?
- As I recall the evidence is pretty clear that argonaut shells go back to the Jurassic.
- I see you now have Pohlsepia in the Pennsylvanian. Presumably we are calling it a cirrate octopod, in which case the first non-cirrate form occurs in the Jurassic if you want to mark that separately. It is not an argonaut but is known rather from soft-body impressions from a quarry in France.

Again, my congratulations on a job well done.
- peftypefty

[monty]

to TONMO, peftypefty, I hope you plan on sticking around to participate in the science forums!

There's a thread around in "Fossils and History" about the evidence that ammonites survived the K/T extinction by a bit, but I think it only came up after Phil's artistic masterpiece...

Any references you have on Cretaceous cuttlefish sound like a good read... I have to confess to having a hard time remembering the details and timing of this stuff (hence needing to refer to charts involving smilies a lot and asking dumb questions of folks like Kevin & Phil) so I'm not sure if that's been mentioned on TONMO or not.

[Phil]

Phil, I just came across this family tree and it's absolutely brilliant. (Can't decide whether I like this one or the creationist one better :))

A few finer points of phylogeny for you, in case you're interested in further modifying this baby:
- Your ceratites seem to spring from within the goniatites, whereas we know pretty clearly that they sprang from within the prolecanites (yeah, I know no one ever uses that word, but I like it).
- Due to a couple of recent discoveries, it's now thought by some that ammonites may have just barely survived the K/Pg boundary. Oh, right, the word "Tertiary" is no longer officially sanctioned either.
- I thought that cuttlefish extended back at least into the Cretaceous. ?
- As I recall the evidence is pretty clear that argonaut shells go back to the Jurassic.
- I see you now have Pohlsepia in the Pennsylvanian. Presumably we are calling it a cirrate octopod, in which case the first non-cirrate form occurs in the Jurassic if you want to mark that separately. It is not an argonaut but is known rather from soft-body impressions from a quarry in France.

Again, my congratulations on a job well done.
- peftypefty

Oh, thanks very much Peftyx2! Welcome to TONMO too.

Your comments and tips are much appreciated, I'm glad you liked those old diagrams, they took a long time to knock up, but were tremendous fun to do. If I ever update the diagram I'll take your comments onboard.

* That's most interesting about the origin of the ceratites, I did not know that.

* Yes, I remember reading about the post-Cretaceous ammonites a couple of years ago. I think they were scaphitids and came from Poland weren't they? I know we had a thread on it somewhere. A search on a thread called 'Ammonites survived the Cretaceous Extinction' or some such should find it.

* Is that the current theory about cuttlefish origins? Most of the internet sources on cuttlefish evolution seem clouded in mystery and are contradictory so I wasn't sure what the working theory was when I drew the diagram up. Which group are they thought to have descended from, a belemnoid of some type perhaps?

* Is there any concrete evidence of Jurassic argonauts? At the time I researched the diagrams I couldn't find any evidence that they existed prior to the Oligocene, let alone the KT event. It's been a while since I've tried to investigate further, but perhaps a paper has come out since, or I quite simply missed it the first time round.

* I hope I didn't give the impression that Pohlsepia was some knd of primitive argonaut. I agree that it is probably some kind of cirrate octopod. The ten arms are a puzzler admittedly. I did try to cover the three forms of known fossil octopuses in the article of the same name, but if I made any major mistakes, please shout.

Welcome to TONMO and I look forward to reading your posts!

,

[monty]

spirula being classified with the cuttles would seem to throw a wrench/spanner in the works of cuttlefish origins from belemnites, I'd think... there are no spiral-shelled belemnites, right? Of course, spirula is a wacky outlier regardless, and calling it a "cuttlefish" seems pretty peculiar to start with, although since it's internally shelled and it has feeding tentacles, I can understand the rationale.

[Architeuthoceras]

to TONMO peftypefty,

According to this article the first argonaut shell cases are found in the Paleogene (Tertiary). Of course it is a few years old now, so maybe some new fossils have been found.

[#30Girl]

Tonmo had an "N" in its name??? Tanmo???

By the way, cool chart. I didn't know all of that before.