The Cretaceous System records a wide range of ecological, evolutionary, and climatic events. Researchers formally divide the Cretaceous succession into Lower and Upper series. However, a mid-Cretaceous interval with variable boundaries is widely used in geological literature, affecting communication with scientists outside the geosciences but also the general public. Here we test for the natural Chronostratigraphic division of the Cretaceous system to evaluate if the current Lower and Upper series alone adequately describe the underlying faunal dynamics. We use a multilayer network1, with layers representing ordered geological stages, to model the fossil record of the Cretaceous cephalopods (i.e., genus-level data from The Paleobiology Database). This network representation captures the complex spatiotemporal relationships between global epicontinental basins and taxa2. Our results indicate that three cephalopod faunas have sequentially dominated Cretaceous oceans following two major global transitions. Despite taxonomic, stratigraphic, and geographic limitations of the data our analysis supports a three-fold division of the Cretaceous succession consisting of Lower Series (Berriasian-Barremian), MiddleSeries (Aptian-Cenomanian), and Upper Series (Turonian-Maastrichtian). This is consistent with the known large-scale organization of the Mesozoic benthic marine faunas1. Our research illustrates how the multilayer network analysis of fossil occurrences can inform chronostratigraphic. This approach allows for standardized identification of major biotic transitions and elucidating the complex relationships among nested units in the hierarchical chronostratigraphic scale.