A Late Carboniferous Coleoid Cephalopod from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte (USA), with a Radula, Arm Hooks, Mantle Tissues, and Ink

Abstract

In the light of the current scanty knowledge of their origin and early evolutionary history, and our inadequate understanding of the higher-level phylogenetic relationships of the Coleoidea, any Carboniferous shell, which might have belonged to a coleoid cephalopod, is of exceptional interest. This report describes two relatively small (total shell and cephalic area is about 64 mm long in one specimen) cephalopod fossils from the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte (Middle Pennsylvanian – Desmoinesian) in Illinois, USA: specimen FMNH PE 32521 (Saunders and Richardson, 1979: Fig. 9a, b, d) and specimen FMNH PE 20808; the latter as a gift to the Field Museum of Natural History by the collector David Young.