1. 1 Nautilus and Allonautilus: Two Decades of Progress W. Bruce
Saunders Department of Geology Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr PA 19010
wsaunder@brynmawr. edu Neil H. Landman Division of Paleontology American
Museum of Natural History New York, New York 10024 landman@amnh. org
When Nautilus: Biology and Paleobiology of a Living Fossil was published
in 1987, it marked a milestone in cross-disciplinary collaboration. More
than half of the contributing authors (36/65) were paleontologists, many
of whom were collaborating with neontological counterparts. Their
interest in studying this reclusive, poorly known animal was being
driven by a search for clues to the mode of life and natural history of
the once dominant shelled cephalopods, through study of the sole
surviving genus. At the same time, Nautilus offered an opportunity for
neontologists to look at a fundamentally different, phylogenetically
basal member of the extant Cephalopoda. It was a w- win situation,
combining paleontological deep-time perspectives, old fashioned
expeditionary zeal, traditional biological approaches and new
techniques. The results were cross-fertilized investigations in such
disparate fields as ecology, functional morphology, taphonomy, genetics,
phylogeny, locomotive dynamics, etc. As one reviewer of the xxxvi
Introduction xxxvii book noted, Nautilus had gone from being one of the
least known to one of the best understood of living cephalopods.