Uh-oh. It turns out that Iowa is even more remote from the ocean than Minnesota (we at least have a great lake connecting us to the Atlantic, sorta), and it’s darned hard to find an Iowa-Cephalopod connection. Except, of course, that once upon a time the great inland sea stretched up this way, and mighty ammonoids would have been swimming about my hotel room. Oh, well, in honor of our absent shelled cephalopods, here’s a nautilus.

It’s going to take an awful lot of global warming and some major geological activity to submerge Iowa again, you know.