#nautiluses

Nautiluses. THIS goddamn animal.

The fundamentals of this design are HALF A BILLION YEARS OLD. Look at its weird eyes. It evolved back when eyes were still new. Those are literal pinhole cameras. Because nature invented photography the same way we did, apparently.

It doesn't have tentacles. Those are cirri, which lots of sea animals use to do all sorts of things. Fetal nautiluses have one giant slug foot that splits into these. They have noodle antennae made out of foot.

You can bring them up out of the ocean and they can survive the equivalent change of like 80 standard atmospheres. That shouldn't be possible. These things evolved a goddamn spacesuit...500 million years ago.

They also swim via jet propulsion. Their shells make them buoyant, which they can regulate, and they shoot water from a pump. So their 500 million year old spacesuit also has a goddamn rocket pack.

There have been 5 mass extinction events (we are causing a six one now). This thing has survived all of them. And it never got better eyes.

Or A BRAIN. That's right. This thing predates BRAINS. It has two separated lobes behind its top and bottom halves of beak that apparently work well enough that it can track smells with okay accuracy in total darkness, in 3 dimensions.

Here is one eating a dead fish.

[ID: Photo of a nautilus in bright blue water. End ID.]

Nautilus, Palau

original under the cut

Yes, like all cephalopods nautiluses have beaks, they’re just harder to see due to the shell and the many tentacles. I couldn’t find a good picture of the beak of a real nautilus, but you can see it in this diagram.

Despite looking superficially similar to nautiluses, it is thought that the ammonite’s closest living relatives are actually the coleoid cephalopods - the squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. We think that the ammonite’s distinctive coiled shell evolved separately over time from their straight-shelled ancestors, bactrites.

So while it is hard to be sure how many arms/tentacles ammonites had (since soft tissue doesn’t generally fossilise), I think a lot of palaeoartists depict them as being similar to modern coleoids in having around 10 arms/tentacles.

This episode of the Palaeocast podcast goes into ammonite evolution (I haven’t actually listened to the episode, but there is some good information/diagrams just on the page).

This is a commissioned piece drawn by @forteangoria of my Good Good character, Sal, all dressed up and formal for one of those balls or maybe a science banquet! He likes to look very pretty for formal events, even if he doesn’t personally care for them all too much for them.