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Updated: September 17, 2025
Among these the most beautiful are small cephalopods called by the Hopi, koaitcoko. Among the many sacred objects in the tiponi baskets of the Lalakonti society, as described in my account of the unwrapping of that fetish, there was a specimen of this ammonite; that the shell was preserved in this sacred bundle is sufficient proof that it is highly venerated.
The primitive biconcave vertebrae of the fish and of the early land vertebrates were retained, and the limbs degenerated into short paddles. The skin of the ichthyosaur was smooth like that of a whale, and its food was largely fish and cephalopods, as the fossil contents of its stomach prove.
The blastoids became more abundant in the Devonian, culminated in the Carboniferous, and disappeared at the end of the Paleozoic. The great eurypterids some of which were five or six feet in length and the cephalopods were still masters of the seas. Fishes were as yet few and small; trilobites and graptolites had now passed their prime and had diminished greatly in numbers.
The ancestors of these cephalopods, although still possessed of a shell and a high visceral hump, regained the swimming life. First, apparently, by means of fins, and then by a simple but very effective use of a current of water, they acquired an often rapid locomotion.
At many places corals formed thin reefs, as at Louisville, Kentucky, where the hardness of the reef rock is one of the causes of the Falls of the Ohio. Sponges, echinoderms, brachiopods, and mollusks were abundant. The cephalopods take a new departure.
Thus it is probable that some four-gilled form was the progenitor of the dibranch cephalopods. Such being the case with regard to the organ of hearing, we have another yet stronger argument with regard to the organ of sight, as has been well pointed out by Mr. J. J. Murphy. In the cuttle-fishes we find an eye even more completely constructed on the vertebrate type than is the ear.
Yet, what monsters these poulps are! what vitality the Creator has given them! what vigour in their movements! and they possess three hearts! Chance had brought us in presence of this cuttlefish, and I did not wish to lose the opportunity of carefully studying this specimen of cephalopods. I overcame the horror that inspired me, and, taking a pencil, began to draw it.
What precise degree of cold was necessary to kill the reptiles and Cephalopods, yet allow certain of the more delicate flowering plants to live, is yet to be determined. The vast majority of the new plants, with their winter sleep, would thrive in the cooler air, and, occupying the ground of the retreating cycads and ginkgoes would prepare a rich harvest for the coming birds and mammals.
Molluscs and Brachiopods and small fishes fill the list, but are of little instructiveness for us, except that they show a general advance of species. Among the Cephalopods, it is true, we find a notable arrival.
The Brachiopods and Molluscs still abound, but the Molluscs begin to outnumber the lower type of shell-fish. In the Cephalopods we find an increasing complication of the structure of the great spiral-shelled types. Such is the life of the Carboniferous period. The world rejoices in a tropical luxuriance.
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