Darwin’s fear was unjustified: Writing evolutionary history by bridging the gaps

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 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. “It’s as if you are missing half of a movie. If you are missing the second half, you can’t understand the story, but if you are missing every second frame, you can still follow the plot without problems.”