Zagorense destombesiceras

The orthocerids (Orthocerida, "straight horn") are an extinct order of cephalopod mollusks. The oldest ones date back to the Upper Ordovician (about 450 million years ago) and became extinct at the end of the Triassic, about 208 million years ago.

The Fezouata deposits, near the Moroccan city of Zagora, are providing a rich sample of a fauna similar, although later in time, to the famous Burgess Shale (Canada). We are talking about fossils between 480 and 472 million years old. The age indicates that the Burgess Shale type communities were not restricted, as was believed, to the early stages of the Cambrian and then suddenly disappeared, but rather they survived much longer, coexisted with the later fauna and would be the normal type of deep sea fauna throughout the planet. So Morocco was an ocean and was over the South Pole.