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Updated: September 17, 2025
Cuttle is the name for the whole race of cephalopods, and is supposed to be a corruption of the word cuddle, in the sense of hugging. They are curious creatures, the one who favoured us with a good view of him being very like a loose red velvet pincushion with eight legs, and most of the bran let out.
As the sands subside, the stumps appear to creep; their intertwisted masses of snakish roots seem to crawl, to writhe, like the reaching arms of cephalopods.... ... Grande Terre is going: the sea mines her fort, and will before many years carry the ramparts by storm. Grande Isle is going, slowly but surely: the Gulf has eaten three miles into her meadowed land. Last Island has gone!
This, it need hardly be said, is just what we find in the geological record. The fruitful, steaming, rich-laden earth now offered tens of millions of square miles of pasture to vegetal feeders; the waters, on the other hand, teemed with gigantic sharks, huge Cephalopods, large scorpion-like and lobster-like animals, and shoals of armour-plated, hard-toothed fishes.
Had there been strong prepossessions against the progressive theory, it would probably have been argued that when these cephalopods abounded, and the siphonated gasteropods were absent, a higher order of zoophagous mollusca discharged the functions afterwards performed by an inferior order in the Secondary, Tertiary, and Post-Tertiary seas.
Thus the genus Orthoceras has been for the first time recognised in a Mesozoic deposit, and with it we find associated, for the first time, large Ammonites with foliated lobes, a form never seen before below the Lias; also the Ceratites, a family of Cephalopods never before met with in the Upper Trias, and never before in the same stratum with such lobed Ammonites. Archaeopteryx macrurus, Owen.
In the letter above quoted, he even named the species he expected to find most prevalent in those greater depths: as, for instance, representatives of the older forms of Ganoids and Selachians; Cephalopods, resembling the more ancient chambered shells; Gasteropods, recalling the tertiary and cretaceous types; and Acephala, resembling those of the jurassic and cretaceous formations.
The Silurian ocean swarms with these great shelled Cephalopods, of which the little Nautilus is now the only survivor. We will not enlarge on the Sponges and Corals, which are slowly advancing toward the higher modern types. Two new and very powerful organisms have appeared, and merit the closest attention.
Moreover, the absence is in this case significant in spite of the imperfection of the geological record, because when we consider how many individuals of various kinds of four-gilled cephalopods have been found, it is fair to infer that at the least a certain small percentage of dibranchs would also have left traces of their presence had they existed.
The animal carried an ink sac, and no doubt used it as that of the modern cuttlefish is used, to darken the water and make easy an escape from foes. Belemnites have sometimes been sketched with fossil sepia, or india ink, from their own ink sacs. In the belemnites and their descendants, the squids and cuttlefish, the cephalopods made the radical change from external to the internal shell.
The Chambered Shells, or the Cephalopods, represented chiefly in the earlier periods by the straight Orthoceratites described in a previous article, are now curled in a close coil, and the internal structure of their chambers has become more complicated. The subjoined wood-cut represents a characteristic Chambered Shell of the Carboniferous age.
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