Other species are embedded in the fossil record of the epochs they belong to.
None of their delicate sensibilities and sophisticated culture will survive in the fossil record.
Ever since Darwin, scientists have been lamenting the gaps in the fossil record.
It was just that they had happened in groups hitherto so rare that they do not feature much in the fossil record.
Humans who looked broadly like present-day people started to appear in the fossil record of Eurasia between 40, 000 and 50, 000 years ago.
These fossils show that the fossil record has the potential to document even the most unlikely event if the conditions are right.
The fossil record also shows an apparent lack of dinosaur fossils in the last few million years leading up to the impact.
For instance, the evolutionary theory bases its evidence on the fossil record.
This makes the few known bipedal snakes in the fossil record hugely significant, because they could hold the clues that settle this particular debate.
Humans were inevitably going to be part of the fossil record.
These involve the near-simultaneous alteration of many body parts and it is rare for the fossil record to catch such palaeolycanthropes in mid-shape-shift, as it were.
That any traces at all remain from so long ago is astounding, and anyway it is not the completeness of the fossil record but its consistency that matters.
They also encourage teachers to discuss with their students such things as gaps in the fossil record, molecular evidence, that they say raises questions about the theory of evolution.
The exhibit displays the work of scientists like paleontologist Philip Gingerich, whose excavations in Pakistan are beginning to fill in some of the many gaps in the fossil record.
This allows us to integrate what we see from the fossil record with data on climate change and changes in flora and fauna that we see around us today.
The fossil record, far from the tenuous succession of gaps described by creationists, provides an admittedly incomplete but beautiful and coherent set of clues to life in the distant past.
Ms Werning therefore decided to trace the phenomenon of rapid growth back as far as she could in the fossil record, by examining the bones of a wide variety of species.
He explained that it filled a gap in the fossil record, demonstrating that dinosaurs split into their three major groups - theropods, sauropodomorphs and ornithischians - very early in their evolution.
As for the difficulty of learning about our past, just recognize how incomplete the fossil record really is: The 280 million Americans alive today collectively have some 60 billion bones in their bodies.
The undoubted increase in average complexity in the fossil record is, according to this view, an accident of the fact that life started simple and therefore had only one direction to go in.
The Liaoning specimen is especially significant because it means the fossil record now sits more comfortably with what genetic studies have been suggesting about the timing of the emergence of the different mammalian lineages.
The first geological indication of the impact that killed the dinosaurs was an unusually high level of iridium in rocks at the end of the Cretaceous, when the beasts disappear from the fossil record.
The discovery fills a gap in the fossil record and raises intriguing questions about the evolution of animals on both Madagascar and India, which separated at about the time this newly identified creature walked the Earth.
Gould, a palaeontologist, observed that there are long periods of stasis in the fossil record, which is true, and inferred from this that selfish genery is therefore wrong because it predicts continual change, which is questionable.
Prof Barnosky and colleagues compared the rates of known species extinctions in mammals, birds and amphibians during the last five centuries with those estimated from the fossil record during the previous Big Five die-outs of the geological past.
They first appear in the fossil record hundreds of thousand of years ago and, at their peak, dominated a wide range, spanning Britain and Iberia in the west to Israel in the south and Uzbekistan in the east.
"Whereas most of us have to deal with disjointed sentences and occasional fractured words to reconstruct the volumes of the fossil record, you've got a whole chapter lying there and you can flick through the pages at your leisure, " he said.
"The amazing thing about the geologic record and the fossil record is that sooner or later some piece of research, some amazing find, sheds light on things that you think are absolutely unanswerable, and really changes the whole picture, " said Professor Sereno.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Golden age of dino finds forecast
应用推荐