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was given a collection of nautiloid fossils from Washington state to analyze.
These specimens belonged to a fossil species assigned to the genus
Eutrepho-
ceras
by A. K. Miller in his famous 1947 treatise. Squires, however, was the
first to declare that this particular emperor had no clothes. He had the intel-
lectual courage to challenge Miller and the others by assigning his fossils to
the genus
Nautilus.
Squires thus confirmed the 1957 discovery by the Russ-
ian Shimansky, as well as extending the known range of
Nautilus
back at
least 40 million years.
Nautilus
now had a fossil record. But not enough of a
one yet to jibe with the implications of our cladistic studies.
At about the same time that Squires's heresy was provoking the ghosts
of A. K. Miller and Bernard Kummel to roll over in their graves, sheer
chance played a part in this story. In 1988 I had the privilege of entertaining
Steve Gould of Harvard University at my house for lunch prior to one of his
speaking engagements. It was a perfect day, we had plenty of time, and be-
cause I had on my mantle a fossil nautiloid collected from Cretaceous de-
posits in California the year before, our conversation eventually turned to
this particular specimen. So there it sat in my house, just waiting for Steve
Gould to get invited to lunch. Steve looked at this large, beautifully pre-
served nautiloid fossil, and pronounced, "Looks like
Nautilus
to me." At the
time I was aghast: Didn't the learned Steve Gould know there were no Cre-
taceous
Nautilus?
After all, he had worked alongside Bernie Kummel at Har-
vard for years and he was surely aware that there were not even any fossil
Nautilus,
let alone Cretaceous-aged specimens. But the comment stayed
with me, and later, after Squires's paper about Tertiary-aged
Nautilus
from
the west coast of North America was published, I began to wonder whether
Gould and Squires were right. Might these west coast specimens be the miss-
ing fossil nautiloids that our cladisitic analyses suggested should be present?
There was only one way to test this: Cut them open and examine their
hatching stage, which would give us more characters with which to test their
pedigree.
The Tertiary-aged species described by Squires and the Cretaceous-
aged specimens from California, when cut, showed hatching stages identical
to those of the modern nautilus. Like the modern nautilus, they hatched at
