If Evolution is the correct theory, how do you explain gaps in the fossil record like this one?

Question

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070716/ap_on_sc/tanzania_rare_fish

Scientists assumed the fish was extinct because of fossil evidence. Why did the remains of this fish cease to generate fossils that would show that it did not disappear 80 million years ago? If it is alive today, why don't we have 60, 50, 40 million year old fossils?

Answer 1

Fossils are kind of like snapshots. And while snapshots can give you a good idea of something that happened at the time it was taken, it doesn't tell you much about the times when you have no snapshots or about things that happen to be outside of each picture.

Suppose, for example, that I took a picture of your front door every day at a random time. 99.9% of the time you would not be in that picture. Does that mean you don't live in your house? Of course not. It just means I happened not to catch you.

So it goes with fossils. Very VERY few creatures ever become fossils. We are never going to be able to put all our pictures together and make a continuous movie of what's going on. Fortunately, the theory of evolution does not rely on fossil evidence alone. So it is easy to be much more certain about it as a process, even if the actual steps it took are a lot more hazy.

Hope that helps clear up any misunderstanding!

Answer 2

Simple explanation: Because they're really RARE ... and they weren't so rare 80 million years ago.

They have evidently been extremely RARE for the last 80 million years ... which is why very few of them (if any) would leave fossils ... and none of those fossils have been found.

80 million years ago (and earlier), they were not so rare. There were lots of them ... so they left plenty of fossils ... and a few of them have been found.

Remember that the number of fossils found for *any* species is a *fraction* of the fossils that actually exist ... and the number of fossils that actually exist is a *fraction* of the number of specimens alive at the time.

It's really not that mysterious ... and doesn't really present much of a problem for the theory of evolution at all.

Scientists are occasionally surprised when they find a species long thought to be extinct. But scientists aren't exactly panicked that this damages the theory of evolution ... because it simply doesn't. In fact, if you check the literature and science news, the scientists are as excited as teenagers discovering that Justin Timberlake is coming in concert.

Now, I have a question:

Why is every coelacanth capture Big News in creationist circles as if scientists were suddenly shattered by this? As the article says, they've been catching coelacanths here and there since 1938!

Answer 3

As has been stated already, their shallow water ancestors left fossils that we can find easily. The shallow-water species went extinct a long time ago, while the deep-water species have remained. Animals that die in the depths don't tend to leave fossils that we can find, it's really that simple.

There really are painfully few serious gaps in the fossil record, no matter what evolution-deniers claim. At least, for animals that have hard parts. The fossil record for mollusks is unbelievably good (except for slugs, octopus, squid, etc., where the reduced shells preclude good fossil formation). The fossil record for arthropods is very goody, though not quite that good. And the record for vertebrates is, while not as good as the above, much better studied.

We can trace an excellent line of descent from fish to modern life. We have fish/amphiban transitions (like icthyostega), amphibian/reptile transitions (like diadactes), reptile/dinosaur transitions (the entire thecodont group), dinosaur/bird transitions (archaeopteryx), and reptile/mammal transitions (diarthognathus). Furthermore, we have transitions between types inside all those groups. Listing all of those would take forever, but some particularly good examples include Ambulcetus (the infamous "walking whale", who may not have been able to actually walk, but certainly shows whales evolved from land animals) and Amphicyon, the dog/bear.

What gaps exist are small and easily accounted for. For instance, there are serious gaps at the base of both the bat and pterosaur family trees. However, both of these are easily explained by the fact that light bones don't fossilize readily. Birds are far rarer as fossils than they should be based on how common they are in life for the same reasons.

The fossil record is also biased. The vast majority of fossils are marine or aquatic. If you look at the fossil record, you'd conclude that 90% of birds are shore birds! Meanwhile, birds are very rare in forests! This obviously reflects fossilization bias, not reality. Bats almost certainly evolved in forests, contributing to their sketchy fossil record.

Answer 4

I dont think that this one fish will toss the theory of evolution out the window, but it is a puzzle as to why it has disappeared from the fossile record. pehaps its population was reduced do to some event 80 million years ago that no other fossiles where formed or that we just havn't found any more.

No matter the reason ... it does still live and has for some 80 million years.

Answer 5

The theory of evolution does not depend on an unbroken line of fossils. It never did. All fossil lines have "gaps" because millions of years ago there weren't too many species to supply an unbroken line. The theory of evolution is supported by inductive reasoning based on the fossils we do find. Once in a while scientists make erroneous conclusions about a lot of things. So what?!? Once they found a piece of copper wire in an ancient Egyptian burial site. Did that mean they had telephones? And when they found nothing in an Cro-Magnon burial site, did that mean they had WiFi? They have to use common sense in interpreting fossils and artifacts, which is something we all should do.

Answer 6

I don't reject evolution, I think it's a brilliant theory that at least tries to explain how life started and how the world works. There exists however, creatures in this world that shouldn't exist and evolution can't explain their existence, or they could exist but the way their bodies function don't make sense. Koala's have to ingest the excrement of their parents in order to eat the eucalyptus leaves. These leaves are toxic and koalas aren't born with the necessary bacteria in their stomach to eat them so they must feast of the waste of their mother in order for their body to develop the bacteria. Now tell me how does an animal evolve in order to do that? Or the giraffe which has an enlarged heart that pumps rapidly, if it weren't for a special valve-like vein or artery in their brain that stops the blood from flowing there when it drinks water, it would basically have an aneurysm and die every time. There even exists a bug that fires a bullet like object from its rear. The thing here is that if this bug were the size of a human, the shear force of this bullet equals the magnitude and power of an atomic bomb. And each time it fires, its body does a reflex in which its legs kick up and its said if it didn't do that, it would be destroying its own body. How does an organism, over the course of millions of years, evolve into that? It couldn't live long enough for the next generation to be born.

Answer 7

Maybe they haven't ceased to generate fossils....maybe we just haven't found the fossils. It's a fish afterall and the ocean covers approximately 70% of our planet, most of which is unreachable by man. Also not every living creature that dies creates a fossil. A fossil is simply an indention of that animal into sedimentary, or a preserved form of that animal (such as mosquitos in amber) in a solid material. Or maybe that fossil was destroyed by a natural disaster/another organism. A lot can happen in 80 million years.

Answer 8

Coelacanths are rare deep ocean dwelling fish. Rocks that were deposited in the deep ocean rarely end up on land for paleontologists to look at. Via plate tectonics, they nearly always get subducted under the continents and disappear. Further, below a certain depth in the ocean (the CCD), carbonate is dissolved and thus you don't get fossils of tests/shells/bones that were orginally made of calcium-carbonate in the rocks anyway.

But coelacanths were not always restricted to deep-ocean refuges. Back in their early history, they were common shallow marine dwellers. Rocks deposited in shallow marine environments are widespread on the continents.

More to the point, fossils of many organisms are rare, yes. And there are more 'living fossils'. But such gaps are expected, and trivial compared to the vast fossil record of hundreds of thousands of species which is overwhelmingly consistent with a branching tree of life as predicted by evolution. Even far more evidence is provided by modern biology.

Answer 9

You make it sound as if fossils are ten a penny, that you can just go down to your local beach and find loads of prehistoric fossils everywhere. Furthermore, there may well be fossils of that fish lying deep in the Earth waiting to be discovered. It could be many millions of years before they are unearthed.

Answer 10

Well I was thinking it was because of where it lives, the chances of remains making fossils, and our ability to find fossils in the ocean. But just maybe it is because God created it 80 million years ago, killed it, then created it again.