Davy Jones, by long-held public consensus the handsomest and most popular of the Monkees, the collectively young, longhaired, wildly famous and preternaturally buoyant pop group of the 1960s and afterward, died on Wednesday in Indiantown, Fla. He was 66.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, his publicist, Helen Kensick, said.

Created in 1966, the Monkees comprised Mr. Jones, Micky Dolenz, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. The group sold millions of records. Its recording of “Daydream Believer,” by John Stewart, became a No. 1 single, as did its recording of “Last Train to Clarksville,” by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, and its cover of Neil Diamond’s “I’m a Believer.”

Though the Monkees officially lasted only until the early ’70s, they reconvened sporadically for decades. For much of that time Mr. Jones also toured as a solo singer-songwriter; among his last performances was one on Feb. 18 at B. B. King Blues Club & Grill in Manhattan.

For all the Monkees’ chart-topping acclaim, the group never pretended to be anything other than what it was: a smoke-and-mirrors incarnation of a pop group reminiscent of that mop-topped one from Liverpool, created for a benignly psychedelic American TV sitcom.