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      The Early Evolutionary History of Belemnites: New Data from Japan

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      1 , * , 2 , 3
      PLoS ONE
      Public Library of Science

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          Abstract

          Belemnites (Order Belemnitida), a very successful group of Mesozoic coleoid cephalopods, dominated the world's oceans throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous. According to the current view, the phylogenetically earliest belemnites are known from the lowermost Jurassic (Hettangian, 201–199 Ma) of northern Europe. They are of low diversity and have small sized rostra without clear grooves. Their distribution is restricted to this area until the Pliensbachian (191–183 Ma). Here we describe two new belemnite taxa of the Suborder Belemnitina from the Sinemurian (199–191 Ma) of Japan: Nipponoteuthis katana gen et sp. nov., which represents the new family Nipponoteuthidae, and Eocylindroteuthis (?) yokoyamai sp. nov. This is the first reliable report of Sinemurian belemnites outside of Europe and the earliest record of typical forms of Belemnitina in the world. The Sinemurian belemnites from Japan have small to large rostra with one deep and long apical groove. Morphologically these forms are completely different from coeval European genera of Hettangian–Sinemurian age. These new findings suggest that three groups of Belemnitina existed in the Hettangian–Sinemurian: 1) European small forms, 2) Japanese very large forms, and 3) the typical forms with a distinctive apical groove, reported here. The Suborder Belemnitina therefore did not necessarily originate in the Hettangian of northern Europe. The new material from Japan documents that the suborder Belemnitina had a much higher diversity in the early Jurassic than previously thought, and it also shows strong endemisms from the Sinemurian onwards.

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          Author and article information

          Contributors
          Role: Editor
          Journal
          PLoS One
          PLoS ONE
          plos
          plosone
          PLoS ONE
          Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
          1932-6203
          2014
          2 May 2014
          : 9
          : 5
          : e95632
          Affiliations
          [1 ]Department of Natural History Sciences, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
          [2 ]Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum, Katsuyama, Japan
          [3 ]Institute of Geology, Mineralogy and Geophysics, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany
          Northern Illinois University, Canada
          Author notes

          Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

          Conceived and designed the experiments: YI SS. Performed the experiments: YI. Analyzed the data: YI SS JM. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: YI. Wrote the paper: YI SS JM. Performed fieldwork: YI SS. Prepared materials: YI. Taxonomic work: YI SS JM.

          Article
          PONE-D-13-54732
          10.1371/journal.pone.0095632
          4008418
          24788872
          faca8685-37c2-4dec-bfc9-ed796858e22e
          Copyright @ 2014

          This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

          History
          : 26 December 2013
          : 26 March 2014
          Page count
          Pages: 7
          Funding
          This research was financially supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (grant 23840002 and 25800285 to YI) ( http://www.jsps.go.jp/english/), the MEXT grant for Tenure Tracking system ( http://www.mext.go.jp/), and the German Research Foundation (Mu 667/43-1) ( http://www.dfg.de/en/). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
          Categories
          Research Article
          Biology and Life Sciences
          Evolutionary Biology
          Paleontology
          Paleobiology
          Paleozoology
          Invertebrate Paleontology
          Biostratigraphy
          Earth Sciences
          Geology
          Stratigraphy

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          Uncategorized

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