Were there cephalopods in the Cambrian era?

A recent find in Newfoundland suggests maybe so:

The octopus is one of the most complex invertebrates known. If fossils from Newfoundland (pictured above) have been interpreted correctly by paleontologists at Heidelberg University, they give more worries to Darwinists: “The 522 million-year-old fossils could turn out to be the first known form of these highly evolved invertebrate organisms, whose living descendants today include species such as the cuttlefish, octopus and nautilus. In that case, the find would indicate that the cephalopods evolved about 30 million years earlier than has been assumed.” Anne Hildenbrand and Gregor Austermann from the University’s Institute of Earth Scientists say this would mean that “cephalopods emerged at the very beginning of the evolution of multicellular organisms during the Cambrian explosion.” Their paper on “A potential cephalopod from the early Cambrian” was published in Communications Biology.

Evolution News, “Cephalopods Join the Cambrian Explosion? And Other Topics in ID” at Evolution News and Science Today (May 11, 2021)

The paper is open access.

One reason that Cambrian cephalopods would be very interesting is that the octopus and cuttlefish, apart from being quite complex, are some of the few invertebrates known to be seriously intelligent. Were their ancestors intelligent back then?

By the way, didn’t a big Darwinian honcho, J. B. S. Haldane, say that he would re-evaluate his beliefs about Darwinian evolution if we found fossil rabbits in the preCambrian era?

Of course he didn’t really mean it. See That unfalsifiable Cambrian rabbit, and sanity … If finding a mammalian vertebrate fossil in the Cambrian, half a billion years ago, would prompt no serious rethink in paleontology, the belief in Darwinism is actually irrelevant to evidence from nature.

Re smart cephalopods, see also:

Is the octopus a “second genesis” of intelligence? Can its strange powers provide insights for robotics or the human mind?

and

Scientists clash over why octopuses are smart New findings show, the brainy seafood breaks all the rules about why some life forms are smart.

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