https://phys.org/news/2024-08-darwin-unjustified-fossil-gaps-major.html
Darwin's fear was unjustified: Study suggests
fossil record gaps not a major issue
Fossils are used to reconstruct evolutionary
history, but not all animals and plants become
fossils and many fossils are destroyed before
we can find them (e.g., the rocks that contain
the fossils are destroyed by erosion). As a
result, the fossil record has gaps and is
incomplete, and we're missing data that we
need to reconstruct evolutionary history.
Now, a team of sedimentologists and
stratigraphers from the Netherlands and the
UK have examined how this incompleteness
influences the reconstruction of evolutionary
history. To their surprise, they found that
the incompleteness itself is actually not
such a big issue.
...
"The regularity of the gaps, rather than the
incompleteness itself, is what determines the
reconstruction of evolutionary history,"
explains Niklas Hohmann of Utrecht U
niversity's Faculty of Geosciences, who led
the study. "If a lot of data is missing, but
the gaps are regular, we could still
reconstruct evolutionary history without major
problems, but if the gaps get too long and
irregular, results are strongly biased."
...
Since Charles Darwin published his theory of
evolution, the incompleteness of the fossil
record has been considered problematic for
reconstructing evolutionary history from
fossils. Darwin feared that the gradual
change that his theory predicted would not
be recognizable in the fossil record due to
all the gaps.
"Our results show that this fear is
unjustified. We have a good understanding of
where the gaps are, how long they are and
what causes them. With this geological
knowledge, we can reconstruct evolution
hundreds of millions of years ago at an
unprecedented temporal resolution," says
Hohmann.
...
https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12862-024-02287-2
Identification of the mode of evolution in
incomplete carbonate successions
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