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Journal of Paleontology

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The Oldest Cephalopods from East Laurentia

¹ New York State Museum, Madison Avenue, Albany, New York 12230, <elanding@mail.nysed.gov>
² Museum für Naturkunde, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, D-10115 Berlin, Germany, current address Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille 1, Sciences de la Terre, Laboratoire de Paléontologie et Paléogéographie du Paléozoïque (LP3), Btiment SN5, 59655 Villeneuve d'Ascq Cedex, France, <bjoekroe@gmx.de>

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
CAMBRIAN CEPHALOPODS are presently reported only from tropical, carbonate platform successions that occur on a number of paleocontinents. Outside of West Gondwanan occurrences on the eastern Sino–Korean Platform in China, the record of Cambrian cephalopods is limited, and information on the early evolution and habitats of this molluscan class has grown slowly over the last century.

Plectronoceras Ulrich and Foerste, 1933, from the Yenchou Member of the Fengshan Formation in Shantung Province and southern Manchuria, northeast China, was the first cephalopod described from the Upper Cambrian (Walcott, 1905; Kobayashi, 1935; see Mutvei et al., 2007). The occurrence of Plectronoceras with Tsinania-Ptychaspis Zone trilobites indicates a middle Late Cambrian age and means that it is generally regarded as the oldest known cephalopod (Chen and Teichert, 1983; Teichert, 1988). By contrast, a large number of named taxa (40 genera, 150 species) represented by brevicones, longicones, and straight to strongly cyrtoconic conchs are found in higher strata of the upper Fengshan Formation in east-central China (Chen and Teichert, 1983). Teichert (1988) regarded the upper Fengshan assemblage as showing a Late Cambrian "radiation" of cephalopods. These cephalopod-bearing strata include the upper 7–8 m of the Wanwankou Member of the Fengshan Formation in northern Anhui and Jiangsu Provinces and the Jiagou and Suxian Members of the Fengshan in southern Anhui (Chen et al., 1979a,b; Chen and Teichert, 1983, Lu and Lin, 1984; Mutvei et al., 2007). Further south in east-central China, approximately coeval cephalopods occur 4–7 m below the top of the Siyangshan Formation in western Zhejiang Province and define an Acaroceras-Antacaroceras Zone (Li, 1983). Although the high diversity Fengshan assemblage was considered lowest Ordovician in some older reviews (e.g., Flower, 1954, 1964; Yochelson . . . [Full Text of this Article]