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Nevertheless, cephalopod paleontologists such as Miller and Kummel had
used even the slightest morphological difference in suture, shell shape, or or-
nament as an excuse to declate new species. Adding to this was the fact that
status among paleontologists was often accorded to those who "discoveted"
the most new species duting a career. There was thus incentive (promotion,
pay, prestige) to announce the discovery of as many new species as possible.
Not surprisingly, "new" species proliferated in the literatute.
By the early 1980s I was not alone in harboring a deep suspicion of cur-
rently accepted nautiloid taxonomy, for by this time anothet paleontologist
intetested in cephalopods, Dt. Bruce Saunders of Bryn Mawr College, had
also spent several years studying living nautilus populations. He too had
doubts about the classification of
Nautilus.
In 1983 we joined forces to try to
understand these creatures' evolutionary history. Our first task was to dis-
cover exactly how many species of the genus
Nautilus
exist today.
Classifying the nautilus
The number of living
Nautilus
species has long been in dispute. By the mid-
1800s, four species were commonly recognized: the widespread
Nautilus pom-
pilius, N. macromphalus
from New Caledonia,
N. stenomphalus
from the
Great Barrier Reef of Australia, and New Guinea's
N. scrobiculatus
, also
known as the King Nautilus. Remarkably little was known about these fout
species, because only two
(N. pompilius
and
N. macromphalus)
had ever been
seen alive. The other two accepted species, N. stenomprialus and
N. scrobicu-
latus,
had (like all fossil nautiloids) been defined on shell characters alone;
they were known only from drift shells without soft parts. By this century,
many more nautilus shells had been collected from isolated island groups
across the Pacific Ocean, and, given the philosophy of classification then
dominant, it is not surprising that many more new species were defined, in-
cluding
N. repertus, N. alumnus, N. perforatus, N. ambiguous,
and, most re-
cently,
N. belauensis.
Yet all save the last were known only from shells, and
theit supposed differentiation as distinct species was based only on perceived
differences in shell shape or size. It seemed to many cephalopod specialists
