Reading the Record

The fossil record reads reliably for order and comparisons, poorly for ancestry from shape and restored soft parts. Completeness depends on the group: a missing shelly sea animal is evidence, a missing insect is not. No young-earth model reproduces the order. Rapid burial fits spectacular fossils, not the rocks; frauds discredit nothing; dinosaur soft tissue remains unsolved for deep time.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

"the global biostratigraphic column seems to be real." — Kurt Wise and Donna Richardson, 2023, two young-earth creationists, after testing 114 stratigraphic boundaries in the Paleobiology Database.1

"Thus, ironically, the best preservation of delicate remains required rapid burial, associated with mass mortality, and very low rates of background sedimentation following the event." — Carlton Brett and colleagues, 2012, on the trilobite beds of the Ordovician to Devonian.2

"The restored model should therefore be regarded as a working hypothesis, which can be amended with the emergence of new data." — Stephan Lautenschlager, 2016, in a review of how fossils are restored.3

Summary

The fossil record is a sample.  Something has to bury an animal before it rots, the rock has to survive, and someone has to dig the animal out, describe it and draw it.  Every one of those steps leaves a mark on what the record can show.  The six articles in this section ask what the record can carry as evidence once those marks are allowed for, and where each side has asked it to carry more than it can.  The named transitional sequences, such as reptile jaw to mammal ear and land mammal to whale, are treated in the sister section, Transitional Sequences.

The section's answer is that the record reads well for order and for comparisons, and poorly for almost everything absolute.  Which fossils lie above which is measured, global, and survives every bias the articles could find.  So does a comparison between two groups or two intervals.  How complete the record is can be measured only group by group, and a missing animal counts as evidence only where its group's measured completeness is high.  Which fossil descends from which, and what a restored animal's soft parts looked like, are far less secure, and the articles show the field saying so in its own journals.

For the young-earth side the verdicts differ, as they should.  On fossil order the verdict is against it.  Working young-earth geologists accept the order and read it as the sequence in which a rising Flood buried one ecological zone after another, but no published young-earth model reproduces it, and the absence of any pre-Flood human bone or worked stone below the Neogene is the hardest single fact for Flood geology.  On rapid burial, stasis, gaps and convergence the young-earth claims are partly right, in narrower forms than they are usually given.  On completeness the young-earth claim is right where it is narrow, for durable sea animals at genus and family rank and for the class and phylum gaps where skeletons first appear, and wrong as a general claim:  Michael Denton's 79% of living land-vertebrate families with fossils falls to 66% against today's list of families, and to 52% counting only fossils older than the Pleistocene.45  On dinosaur soft tissue the young-earth side holds a real anomaly:  measured decay rates say the molecules should be gone, and no mechanism has been shown to preserve them for longer than about two years in a laboratory.  The fraud argument is dead.  The argument about how much of a restoration is bone is real, and the mainstream made it first.

One rule runs through all six articles:  an absence is only as strong as the record is complete for that kind of thing, and the rule binds both sides.  The first five articles stated it flatly, as absence being weak evidence in both directions.  The completeness article measured it, and found that true for most of what the debate is about but not for everything.  Of the fossil genera known from three or more stratigraphic stages, three quarters vanish from the catalogued record for at least one stage and then come back.6  Yet a brachiopod genus as findable as the average known one, living through three stages, would be missed in all three about one time in two hundred, and an insect genus about one time in four.7  So a gap among shelly sea animals is evidence, and a gap among insects, soft-bodied animals or most land vertebrates is not.  A young-earth writer cannot use the record's leakiness to excuse a missing pre-Flood world and then treat every gap between groups as proof that nothing lived there.  A mainstream writer cannot use it to excuse missing intermediates and then treat some other missing fossil as decisive.  The objections below show where absence starts to count:  when a thing is durable, well sampled, and expected in large numbers.

The six articles under this heading:

  1. The Order of the Fossil Record. Two million database records show a strict global order, and all 29 claimed or apparent violations audited there failed. Hydrodynamic sorting, differential escape and the published Flood models do not reproduce the order. One young-earth prediction, a succession from marine to land fossils up the column, is confirmed by independent data.
  2. Trends in the Fossil Record. Stasis is real but weaker than claimed. Gaps between groups grow with rank only in a way nobody can yet measure. Convergence is the strongest of the four patterns. The claim that the record is complete enough to make its gaps real fails on measurement as a general claim.
  3. Fossil Preservation. Rapid burial is right for the spectacular fossils creationists cite and wrong as a fact about the rocks. Most fossils are shells that lay on the sea floor for centuries, and each famous fossil bed is a stack of small burials in one quiet setting.
  4. Dinosaur Soft Tissue. Flexible vessels and protein fragments in dinosaur bone are real, and even an old-earth critic grants that they are original. They outlast measured decay rates by three to four orders of magnitude, and the mainstream's preservation chemistry has not been shown to work over geological time. The radiocarbon dates and the "dinosaur DNA" claims fail.
  5. Fossil Reconstruction and Fraud. Every famous fraud was caught by scientists, so fraud discredits nothing. The real question, to ask of any restoration, is which parts are bone, and the answer is often not much.
  6. How Complete Is the Fossil Record?. Completeness depends on the group: shelly marine genera are re-found in about four of five stages they span, insects and spiders in about one in three, so absences among durable sea animals are evidence, absences among insects and soft-bodied animals prove little, and land vertebrates fall between. The young-earth case is right where it is narrow and wrong as a general claim, and on the tests that tell the two models apart the gaps fall mostly where an incomplete record puts them.

Radiometric dating is not used as evidence in this section.  The order rests on superposition, younger rock lying on older, which young-earth geology accepts, and the completeness measures count stages, not years.  Where an age in millions of years appears, it is the mainstream figure under discussion.  In the soft-tissue article that age is the very thing being tested.

How the six articles read the evidence

Order first, dates never.  Every argument in the section works from what lies above what.  Nicolas Steno stated the rule in 1669, and the periods of the geologic column were named by field geologists before any rock had an absolute date.  A reader who rejects every decay constant in physics loses nothing in these articles except the labels.

Compute, then quote.  Most writing on the fossil record is a fight over quotations, and the fossil record is the most quote-mined subject in apologetics.  So the articles count instead.  They query the Paleobiology Database, a public catalogue of 2,001,053 published fossil occurrences in 277,490 collections, and Macrostrat, a public database of rock units.89  The completeness article downloaded the database again in October 2026, 1,902,080 body-fossil occurrences, to measure how often each group turns up in the stages its range spans.10  They also measure the database's own biases before using it:  the United States holds 22.4% of all catalogued collections, the top ten countries hold 56.9%, and the number of genera found in an interval tracks the number of occurrences collected at a Spearman correlation of 0.888.1111  A raw diversity curve is largely a map of where paleontologists have dug.

State each position from its own primary sources before testing it.  The articles quote the young-earth authors in their own words before weighing them:  Andrew Snelling and Leonard Brand on rapid burial, and Tim Clarey, Jeffrey Tomkins, Kurt Wise and Donna Richardson on fossil order.  On completeness they quote Wise, Michael Oard and Duane Gish, and the design writers Michael Denton and Stephen Meyer.  On soft tissue they set the young-earth writers beside Fazale Rana, an old-earth Christian biochemist who argues the other way.

Three verdicts, not two.  A young-earth argument can be wrong.  It can be right or partly right.  Or the question can be unfinished:  the pattern is real, the standard answers fail, and nobody has a working model yet.  The six articles reach all three, and in one case, soft tissue, the unfinished problem sits on the mainstream side.

Part 1: The order of the fossil record

The question.  Dig anywhere and the fossils come out in the same order:  trilobites below dinosaurs, dinosaurs below horses.  Can a one-year global Flood explain that order?

The young-earth position, first.  Working young-earth geologists do not deny the order, and have not for decades.  They read it as the sequence in which the Flood destroyed and buried ecological zones, deep sea first, then shelf, lowland and upland.  Their argument is about mechanism and about where in the rock the Flood began and ended.

The verdict.  No young-earth explanation yet accounts for the order, and the order article says so.  Fifty-six major groups, checked against the whole database, fall into a strict staircase of first appearances, and the steps rest on large samples:  17,885 Cambrian trilobite occurrences, 998 Triassic dinosaur occurrences, 746 Paleogene rabbit occurrences.12  Twenty-four boundary tests across 2,001,053 records found two records below a group's first appearance, and both were filing errors:  a lungfish entered under a reptile heading and a sponge sharing its genus name with an insect.8  Twenty-nine claimed or apparent violations, from Precambrian pollen to the Paluxy man tracks, were audited one at a time against a test fixed in advance, and none survived.13  Hydrodynamic sorting fails on one pair of animals:  brachiopods and bivalves are alike in size, shape and settling behaviour, yet in North America their ratio of genera falls about 990-fold from the Cambrian to the Quaternary.14

The hardest fact is about stone, not bone.  The genus Homo has 238 occurrences in the database, none below the Pliocene, against 1,345,826 occurrences of everything else below the Neogene.1516  An Institute for Creation Research scientist wrote in 2015, "we know of no undisputed human skeletal remains in Flood rocks".17  Bloating, scavenging and dissolving acid would remove dinosaurs as readily as people, and none of them touches worked flint, pottery or metal, which a city-building culture leaves in enormous quantities.  The best young-earth answer, that the pre-Flood continent was subducted, has a mechanism in catastrophic plate tectonics and predicts debris in an accretionary wedge, but nobody has done the buoyancy arithmetic or searched the wedge.

What it concedes to the young-earth side.  One young-earth prediction holds.  Ecological zonation predicts that land fossils should become more common up the column, and the non-marine share of fossils in Macrostrat's rock units runs 0.0, 0.1, 1.7, 5.6, 23.3 and 45.0 percent across Clarey's six megasequences.18  But zonation is a filter, not a mechanism.  It says which broad habitat was buried when, and nothing about the order within one habitat, which is most of the record.  Tomkins and Clarey grant the point for the first half of the column:  "Questions about why distinctly different fossil assemblages are found in the Sauk, Tippecanoe and Kaskaskia Megasequences remain, even though all are dominantly marine."19  The movement has also policed itself:  a creationist, Arthur Chadwick, killed the Precambrian pollen claim with better sampling,20 and the Institute for Creation Research withdrew the Paluxy tracks in print in 1986.21  And the strongest concession is a young-earth one.  Wise and Richardson tested 114 boundaries, concluded that the global fossil column is real, and found that burial order bore no relationship to fluctuations in Flood energy.1  The order article recomputed their statistic on the same database.  It reproduces, but their Cambrian zeros come from regional stage names their query missed, and only their Cenozoic zone survives equal sampling.2222  → The Order of the Fossil Record

The question.  Four patterns are cited constantly in creationist writing.  Species appear, stay the same and vanish, which is stasis.  The higher the rank, the bigger the jump between groups.  Unrelated animals often look more alike than related ones, which is convergence.  And the record is said to be complete enough that its gaps are real rather than missing pages.  Do the four hold up?

The verdict.  Mixed, and two of the four go against the way young-earth writers use them.  Stasis is real but weaker than claimed.  When the trends article refitted 709 published fossil trait series, stasis won mostly where sampling was thinnest, and among the 62 best-sampled series it won none.23  What survives is narrower:  change in these series is fast but bounded, and the bound has no accepted explanation.  Josef Uyeda's team, after fitting more than 8,000 body-size measurements, wrote, "We conclude that some unspecified process of bounded evolution is responsible for the band we observe in our data".24  Gaps scale with rank only qualitatively.  Michael Foote's standard review of the field states that the "extent of morphological divergence among taxa generally increases with taxonomic rank".25  But each measure of body form is built for one study, and the same review grants that it cannot say whether diatoms are more diverse in form than dinosaurs.25  The database's own sister-group gaps rise from zero at species and genus to 6.00 and 13.39 million years at family and order, then fall to 6.50 and 4.50 at class and phylum, because most phyla and classes first appear in the same Cambrian window.26  Convergence is the strongest of the four.  When Mark Springer's team hid the DNA of each living order of placental mammals and let the skeleton alone place it, as a fossil would have to, 13 of the 18 orders moved to a different superorder:  "as many as 72% of the living placental orders move to a different superordinal group when molecular data are missing".27  The trends article prints the strongest answer as well:  a survey of 230 published trees found morphology worse than molecules, but not significantly worse.28

Completeness cannot carry the argument.  Every high completeness figure is conditional.  Foote's own best case, 75% of graptoloid species sampled, means 75% "of those species that had the potential to be represented in light of where sediment was accumulating in the past, has survived to the present day and has been studied."29  Drop the condition and the numbers fall apart:  North American Cenozoic mammal species come out 88% sampled, global Miocene mammal species about 4%.2930  The collector's-curve argument fails on a recount.  Michael Benton called the European dinosaur curve saturated in 1998, and 118 of the 235 valid European genera have been named since.31  And 75.9% of the 16,804 genera known from three or more stages have at least one internal gap, with a median length of 6.8 million years.6  How complete the record is for each group is measured in Part 6.

What the trends article audits on its own side.  It checked the quotations in this project's own research notes first.  Of 65, twenty survived as written, twenty could not be sourced at all, and all nine that had been cut so as to change their meaning were cut in the direction that helps the young-earth argument.32  What gets cut, every time, is the author's own explanation.  → Trends in the Fossil Record

Part 3: Fossil preservation

The question.  Almost every animal that dies is eaten, rotted or broken within days to years.  If fossils need rapid burial, and the rocks are full of fossils, do the rocks record a catastrophe?

The young-earth position, first.  Andrew Snelling, in the fullest young-earth treatment of the subject, puts it this way:  "The presence of so many fossils, often preserved in exquisite detail, throughout the geologic record on every continent, are testimony to the rapid burial of countless animals and plants during the catastrophic sedimentation of these strata."33

The verdict.  The weak form of the claim is right, and it is mainstream.  An articulated skeleton, a soft-bodied animal or a fish with its scales on was taken out of circulation fast, and taphonomists, who study what happens between death and discovery, have measured the clocks.  Lack of oxygen does not do the work.  Peter Allison sealed worm and crustacean carcasses in airtight jars of sediment, and decay "had virtually destroyed the carcasses within 25 weeks" even without oxygen.34  What preserves soft parts is early mineral growth or sealing, and each famous fossil bed has its own chemistry.

The strong form fails on the fossils that make up most of the record.  Snelling grants that "the vast majority of them by number are the remains of shallow-water marine invertebrates".33  Shells are the one kind of remain that needs no rapid burial.  On one Bahamian sand flat, every sand dollar dated to after the nuclear weapons tests, with a spread of at most two years, while the clam valves lying beside them spanned 4,000 years.35  The standard review calls this mixing of generations "pervasive in the fossil record" and the reason fossils are usually found "rotated and disarticulated".36  The famous fossil beds do not fit the strong form either.  The richest bed of the Burgess Shale, seven metres thick, holds 26 separate layers of fossils, "each representing a single obrution event", a sudden smothering by mud.37  Brett's irony, quoted at the top of this page, is the mainstream's summary:  the best preservation needed rapid burial and then very little sediment afterwards.  Leonard Brand, a young-earth paleontologist, asks the question in print:  "Is it possible to fit many episodes of several months of disarticulation into a one-year Cambrian to Cretaceous process?"38

What it adds to the rest of the section.  Preservation bias is real, large and one-sided in a known way.  Soft-bodied animals "have negligible preservation potential" in ordinary settings, and in marine sands and muds they "constitute 30–100% of species".39  Decay also removes the most informative features first, so fossils look more primitive than they were:  in simulated fossilisation of 78 published data sets, "61% of 491 taxa shift significantly down phylogenies, from their original position toward the root, vs 39% which shift significantly up".40  Bias of this kind can make a group look rarer, or move its first appearance later and its last appearance earlier.  It cannot put a group below one it must postdate.  → Fossil Preservation

Part 4: Dinosaur soft tissue

The question.  Since 2005, flexible vessels, cell-like structures and fragments of original protein have been reported from dinosaur bones tens of millions of years old.  Are they real, and if so, can they be that old?

The verdict.  They are real, and the young-earth argument built on them is partly right.  The finds are published in Science, Nature and PNAS, and even Fazale Rana of the old-earth ministry Reasons to Believe grants that "the soft tissue remnants isolated from a wide range of fossilized specimens are authentic endogenous materials".41  The tension is in the decay rates, and almost all of them come from secular laboratories.  Twenty-seven scientists replying in Science to the Tyrannosaurus protein report estimated that at the burial temperature of Montana's Hell Creek beds, bone should lose all but 1% of its collagen in about 14,000 years.42  That is a half-life of about 2,000 years, and 68 million years is about 34,000 half-lives.43  DNA fares worse.  The oldest DNA ever isolated is about two million years old, roughly thirty times younger than any dinosaur.44

What it concedes to the mainstream.  The mainstream answer is real chemistry:  close packing of molecules, binding to bone mineral, and cross-linking driven by iron from the animal's own blood.  Its weakness is that it has not been shown to work over geological time.  The best experiment, soaking ostrich vessels in purified hemoglobin, "increased tissue stability more than 200-fold, from approximately 3 days to more than two years at room temperature (25°C)".45  Two years is the longest any mechanism has been tested.  But the young-earth decay clock is also an extrapolation, from heated bone and from bones a few thousand years old, so the finds show that these molecules last longer than the baseline predicts.  They do not by themselves date the bone.  And two of the young-earth side's favourite claims fail.  "Dinosaur DNA" is stains and antibody signals, never a recovered sequence.  Radiocarbon in dinosaur bone is contamination:  a 70-million-year-old mosasaur bone gave 4.68% of modern carbon-14, which its authors said most likely reflects "bacterial activity near the outer surface" of the bone.46

Why it matters to the rest of the section.  Soft tissue is the one place in these six articles where the unfinished problem sits on the mainstream side.  It is also a different kind of evidence from the rest.  It says nothing about which fossils lie above which, so it cannot rescue a Flood model from the order problem in Part 1.  And Rana marks its limit from the other direction:  the finds, in his words, are "fully compatible with an old-earth view and in no way validates YEC".41  The soft-tissue article agrees that a preservation mechanism shown to work would dissolve the anomaly, and so it calls the finds a live question, not a proof of a young earth.  → Dinosaur Soft Tissue

Part 5: Fossil reconstruction and fraud

The question.  Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man and Archaeoraptor are the standard exhibits in the argument that paleontology cannot be trusted.  Do they show that, and if not, what is the real problem with the pictures in the textbooks?

The verdict.  The fraud argument is weak, and the fraud article does not make it.  In every famous case scientists caught the fraud.  Piltdown was exposed by chemical and microscopic tests that its exposers designed and ran, and they wrote that removing it "clarifies very considerably the problem of human evolution."47  Nebraska Man was retracted in Science by the man who co-signed the identification.  Archaeoraptor never passed peer review at all.  Only two deliberate forgeries appear in the whole file, and in both the forger was outside science.

The real argument sits next to it, and it is much better.  It is the gap between the bones that exist and the picture that gets printed.  The forged Archaeoraptor slab is built from 88 pieces.48  An honest, ordinary Confuciusornis slab scanned by the same team as a control was "assembled from 81 separate pieces", and 55 of them are "extraneous shims" carrying no bone.48  Composite assembly is normal preparation, not fraud.  A restoration adds more again.  Depending on how much soft tissue the restorer wraps around the bones, body-mass estimates for an adult Tyrannosaurus "range from less than 6 tonnes to over 18 tonnes."49  The same study found that the rank order of 52 dinosaurs by mass holds across methods at a correlation above 0.99.49  A relative claim survives where an absolute one does not.

The corrections were all mainstream.  Casineria, a single headless skeleton described in Nature in 1999 as amniote-like, was read as having claws, a feature of the reptile, bird and mammal group.  David Marjanović spent a day with the specimen and found that its finger ends "are neither pointed as expected of a claw, nor rounded as incorrectly shown in the interpretative drawing".50  The drawing moved the first appearance of that group for twenty years.  A jaw joint credited to Brasilodon for two decades was removed by micro-CT scans in 2024.51  A tooth named as a Triassic mammal turned out to be "a Neogene shrew", and the Paleobiology Database still lists it as a Triassic mammal, with the paper that corrected it attached as its own reference.528  The fraud article draws a practical rule from the timing:  corrections came in months when the scan data were public and in decades when checking required a trip to one specimen.

Claims it kills on the young-earth side.  The video clip said to show Owen Lovejoy cutting Lucy's pelvis with a power saw is narrated, in the same clip, as work on a plaster copy, and a young-earth creationist with a doctorate in the earth sciences wrote in 2026, "The allegations of fraud or a manipulated reconstruction do not stand up to scrutiny."53  Nebraska Man was not used at the Scopes trial.  The fraud article ends on one question to ask of any restoration:  which parts are bone?  Lautenschlager's sentence in the epigraph above is the professional version of it.  → Fossil Reconstruction and Fraud

Part 6: How complete is the fossil record?

The question.  If the record is nearly complete, its gaps are real and missing intermediates never lived.  If it is badly incomplete, the gaps mean little.  Which is it?

The young-earth and design position, first.  Michael Denton counted 79.1% of living land-vertebrate families as "found as fossils."4  Kurt Wise wrote that "a very large percentage of modern species have a fossil record,"54 and Michael Oard that "the fossil record is essentially complete."55

The verdict.  The record is complete enough to make some gaps real and too incomplete to make most of them mean anything, and which kind a gap is can be measured.  "Complete" has at least four meanings:  the share of all species ever to live that are known as fossils, which is small on every published estimate;  the share of living species or families that also have fossils;  how often a known lineage turns up in the stages it lived through;  and how well fossil order matches the branching order of family trees.  The third was computed for the completeness article.  A genus of brachiopods, trilobites, cephalopods, conodonts, foraminifera or bivalves known before and after a stage is found inside it 76% to 83% of the time;  for insects the figure is 35%, for spiders and their kin 29%;  marine collections score 76% and land and freshwater collections 56%.10  The headline young-earth numbers overstate.  Of the 657 living land-vertebrate families on today's list, 66% have any fossil record and 52% have one older than the Pleistocene;  of bird families, 34%.5  Steven Holland, the only mainstream source in Oard's article, calls the record "an imperfect and incomplete data set,"56 and Stephen Meyer's quotation of Michael Benton's team drops its condition and adds "[and above]."57

What it concedes to the young-earth side.  More than the trends article did.  For durable, abundant sea animals at genus and family rank, absence is evidence:  a common, long-lived genus intermediate between two brachiopod families, living in seas that were sampled, would almost certainly have been found.7  The class and phylum gaps among shelly animals, which sit where skeletons first appear at the base of the Cambrian, fit the prediction of separately created kinds better.  The evolutionary answer, that the ancestors had no shells, is reasonable but rests on the one part of the record no completeness measure reaches, and burrows, which need no hard parts, also multiply there, from 7 trace genera to 42.58  And neither per-stage sampling nor the fit between family trees and fossil order declines in older rocks, a point a Flood model could use and has not.1059

Where the gaps fall.  On the tests that tell the models apart, mostly where an incomplete record puts them.  Family trees predict the order of first appearances better than chance in most published groups.60  Ranges extend "especially downward" as search continues, on a young-earth writer's own reading.61  And trilobite discovery has nearly stopped while dinosaur discovery is still accelerating, which is what an incomplete record searched unevenly looks like.31  The completeness article calls neither model finished.  → How Complete Is the Fossil Record?

Part 7: The six side by side

"Verdict" uses the three kinds named above, and says whose claim it judges.

Article Claim tested Verdict Strongest point for the mainstream Strongest point for the young-earth side
The order of the fossil record A one-year Flood explains the global order of fossils Against the young-earth argument All 29 claimed or apparent violations fail; no human bone or worked stone among 1,345,826 occurrences below the Neogene The marine-to-land succession up the column is confirmed; the subducted-continent answer is untested rather than refuted
Trends in the fossil record Stasis, gaps by rank, convergence and completeness support the young-earth case Mixed: stasis and gaps partly right, convergence right, completeness wrong as a general claim and measured group by group in How Complete Is the Fossil Record? Stasis wins none of the 62 best-sampled series; the database's gaps fall again above the order Bounded change has no accepted explanation; skeletons alone misplace 13 of 18 mammal orders
Fossil preservation Fossils show that the rocks were laid down in a catastrophe Partly right: right about individual fossils, wrong about the rocks Clam valves on one sand flat span 4,000 years; one Burgess bed holds 26 separate burials Articulated and soft-bodied fossils needed sealing within hours to weeks, by mainstream measurement
Dinosaur soft tissue Original protein cannot survive tens of millions of years Partly right; the deep-time explanation is unfinished Iron from blood stabilised tissue more than 200-fold; the radiocarbon and DNA claims fail At Hell Creek's temperature, measured decay takes even 10 kg of collagen down to one molecule in about 150,000 years; no mechanism has been tested past two years
Fossil reconstruction and fraud Frauds and restorations show that paleontology cannot be trusted Wrong about fraud; right, and mainstream, about restorations Scientists caught every fraud; ranks of body mass hold across methods at above 0.99 One Tyrannosaurus skeleton supports 6 to 18 tonnes; a drawing moved a first appearance for twenty years
How complete is the fossil record? The record is complete enough that its gaps are real Partly right: right for durable sea animals at genus and family rank and for the class and phylum gaps where skeletons first appear; wrong as a general claim Insects are re-found in about one stage in three; Denton's 79% of living land-vertebrate families falls to 52% before the Pleistocene; family trees predict fossil order better than chance A brachiopod genus would be missed through three stages about one time in two hundred; sampling quality does not fall in older rocks

Three things stand out.  Where young-earth claims succeed, they succeed about particular fossils or about what fossils cannot show:  a fish sealed fast, a protein that outlasted its clock, a skeleton that cannot place itself in a tree.  Where they fail, they fail on a pattern measured across the whole column.  The completeness article supplies the one exception to that first point, and it qualifies the first five articles' picture:  two column-wide patterns lean the young-earth way, the class and phylum gaps among the best-preserved animals and the absence of any decline in sampling quality in older rocks, and neither touches the order.  Second, most of the limits that help the young-earth side were published by the mainstream, in its own journals, about its own evidence.  Third, the one large-scale result that survives every bias the six articles measured, the order, is the one that goes against the young-earth side.

Part 8: What the six add up to

  1. Suppression is not inversion. Every bias these articles measured can hide a fossil or blur a picture. Soft-bodied animals vanish, shells pile up across centuries, one country holds more than a fifth of the catalogued collections, raw diversity tracks collecting effort, and a restorer can triple a dinosaur's weight. None of those can put a group below one it must postdate, and in 24 boundary tests across the whole database none had.8 That is why the order survives while nearly every absolute claim in the section is cut down.
  2. Absence is weak evidence for most of what the debate is about, both ways. The order article states the trap plainly. Lazarus taxa, such as the coelacanth, vanish from the record and reappear, so they show that the record is patchy.62 A movement that uses them for that cannot then use the growth of gaps with rank to argue that the record is complete enough to make its gaps real. The trends article measures the patchiness: 75.9% of well-sampled genera have a hole in their own range.6 The preservation article supplies a cause: soft-bodied animals make up 30 to 100% of the species in marine sands and muds, and almost never fossilise.39 The completeness article measures the leak by group: insect genera are re-found in about one in three of the stages their ranges span, and genera in land and freshwater collections as a whole in about one in two.10 The rule cuts against familiar young-earth arguments: an absent intermediate among land vertebrates, flying animals or soft-bodied animals is weak evidence that none existed. An absent ancestor below a Cambrian phylum is less weak than the first five articles allowed. The completeness article scores the class and phylum gaps among shelly animals as the one test where the young-earth prediction fits better: the evolutionary answer, ancestors without shells, is reasonable, but burrows, which need no shells, also multiply sharply at the base of the Cambrian,58 though the Cambrian article finds arthropod burrows about two stages below the first trilobite bodies. The rule binds the mainstream as well. A writer who excuses missing intermediates by the record's leakiness cannot treat some other absence as decisive without showing why that case is different. The next point says when it is.
  3. But absence counts when the thing is durable, well sampled and expected in numbers. The completeness article puts numbers on it. A genus of brachiopods, conodonts, cephalopods or foraminifera known before and after a stage is found inside it 81% to 83% of the time, so one living through three stages would be missed in all three less than one time in a hundred, against about one time in four for an insect genus.107 Where such genera are missing between durable marine families, that article counts the absence as real evidence that no common, long-lived intermediate lived in the seas that were sampled. Trilobite discovery has slowed to 13% of its peak decade, while dinosaur discovery is still accelerating, so a trilobite gap and a dinosaur gap are different kinds of thing.31 Only 4 of the 106 living bivalve families lack a fossil record.63 And a whole pre-Flood civilisation should have left worked stone, which is as durable as rock and is made in enormous numbers, in an interval holding 1,345,826 other occurrences.16 The weak-absence rule does not reach that case, as the objections below explain.
  4. Relative claims hold, absolute claims do not. The order is relative. So is the rank of dinosaur body masses, which holds across methods at a correlation above 0.99 while the masses themselves vary threefold.49 So are comparisons between groups and intervals. A census of living and dead sea-floor animals in one bay off North Carolina found the dead heavily skewed, with molluscs making up 98.2% of dead individuals against 35.0% of living ones, yet concluded that "the fossil record is likely to be reliable with respect to relative comparisons of composition and diversity."64 Absolute completeness, by contrast, runs from 88% to 4% for the same animals depending on the denominator.2930 The completeness measures that work are relative too: how often a known genus turns up in the stages its range spans, and whether family trees match fossil order. The share of all species ever to live that are known as fossils is small on every published estimate and has never been measured.
  5. Shape is the weakest instrument, and one of its errors has a direction. Skeletons alone misplace most living mammal orders, decay strips the most informative features first, and restorations add tissue no bone fixes. The preservation article draws the lesson for both sides. Fossils tend to look more primitive than they were, 61 to 39, so a creationist arguing that a stem fossil is really a modern form has a measured bias on his side, and one arguing that groups appear "fully formed" is arguing against it.40
  6. Rapid burial and surviving protein are facts about individual fossils. A fish sealed within days and a vessel that outlasted its decay clock both say something true about one specimen. Neither says when the rock was laid down, and neither bears on which fossils lie above which. The young-earth side's best evidence in this section is of that kind.
  7. The audits found errors on both sides, and the young-earth errors ran in one direction. The mainstream corrected its own Casineria, Brasilodon and Tikitherium, and Gene Hunt withdrew his own finding that plankton lineages show directional change more often than other fossils.65 On the young-earth side, all nine quotations in this project's notes that had been cut so as to change their meaning were cut toward the young-earth argument.32 The completeness article found the same direction on the completeness claim: Oard's "nearly complete" is not what Holland wrote, and Meyer's quotation of Benton's team drops the condition that limits it to families and stages.5756 The movement's best moments are corrections of its own: Morris on Paluxy, Chadwick on pollen, Brand's question about disarticulation, Wise and Richardson accepting the column, Rupe on Lucy, and Oard reporting that fossil ranges keep expanding "especially downward," which is what an incomplete record predicts.21612038153
  8. What a young-earth answer would need. A sorting model that predicts the brachiopod-to-bivalve ratio as a number, not an argument that sorting might contribute. One worked stone from Paleozoic or Mesozoic rock, found in place under controlled conditions. Tim Clarey's database of nearly 3,000 rock columns, released so others can test it.6667 A census of which fossil beds are single burials and which are mixed over centuries, which nobody on either side has made. For the subducted continent, the buoyancy arithmetic. And a published estimate of how many species lived before and after the Flood, without which a Flood model predicts no particular completeness. The mainstream owes two things in return: a soft-tissue preservation mechanism shown to work for longer than two years, and Michael Foote's proposed estimate of how many major transitions an incomplete record should leave visible, without which "transitions were fast and small" stays a hypothesis about the very places where the record is silent.68

Objections and responses

  1. "Young-earth writers use Lazarus taxa to show the record is patchy, and the growth of gaps with rank to show it is complete. Which is it?" The charge is fair, and the six articles answer it by giving up the general completeness claim. The trends article concludes that completeness cannot carry the argument it is usually asked to carry, and keeps only narrow uses that survive a patchy record: abrupt appearance at family rank in durable groups whose record is nearly full, such as the bivalves, and the measured spread of body forms early in a group's history, which does not depend on counting missing species.63 The completeness article measures where that narrow use holds, and it holds best for brachiopods, conodonts, cephalopods, foraminifera and bivalves.10 Lazarus gaps also cost a Flood model something: on it, a genus missing from the middle of a run of beds was alive and nearby while those beds were laid down, weeks apart. The mainstream faces the mirror image. Martin Hughes and colleagues, finding that most groups reach their widest range of forms early, wrote that "Early high patterns inevitably imply an unsampled period of cladogenesis (or the existence of ghost ranges) at the base of the clade, but this either occurs too fast for the available stratigraphic resolution or is not fossilized".69 Both sides lean on the unrecorded part of the record somewhere. The fair standard is to say where, and to stop arguing from a gap that the same argument elsewhere calls normal.
  2. "If the record is this patchy, the order is just sampling as well." No. The order tests do not ask how complete the record is. They ask whether any record lies below the first appearance of a group it must postdate, and across 2,001,053 records the answer was two filing errors.8 Even the holes point the same way: every one of the 29,587 gaps inside a genus's range has the genus in its proper place on both sides.6 Sampling bias can hide a fossil. It cannot sort a jumble into the same order on every continent.
  3. "If absence is weak evidence, the missing pre-Flood humans prove nothing." Here two of the articles appear to disagree. The preservation article lists the absence of pre-Flood humans in Flood rock among the absences that a leaky record makes weak. The order article calls the same absence the hardest single fact for Flood geology. They agree once bone and stone are separated, and the preservation article separates them itself, a section earlier, where it says taphonomy cannot explain the missing artefacts because worked stone does not float, rot or get eaten. The weak-absence rule rests on measured rates for things that decay or are rarely buried: soft bodies, scattered bones, a genus that skips a stage. The completeness article gives the same rule a number for each group, and where a group's measured completeness is high, its absence counts. The rule does not reach worked flint, pottery and metal, which last as long as the rock around them, are made in enormous numbers by any city-building people, and are missing from an interval that holds 1,345,826 other fossil occurrences.1615 What the articles cannot price is the size of the pre-Flood population, because no young-earth author has published a defended estimate. A small population would weaken the argument, but it sits awkwardly with Genesis, which describes people multiplying on the earth and building cities, and with the movement's own calculations of large pre-Flood populations.
  4. "Soft tissue shows the bones are young, so the order problem goes away." It does not, for two reasons. The order is relative, so it needs a burial mechanism whatever the age of the bones, and Part 1 shows that none of the published ones works. And the soft-tissue argument shows that some molecules outlasted a decay clock that is itself extrapolated from heated bone and young bones. That is a real anomaly for deep time, but the soft-tissue article calls it a live question, not a date.
  5. "Rapid burial is everywhere, so the rocks record one catastrophe." Rapid burial is everywhere that spectacular fossils are, and the mainstream agrees. It is not the rule for most fossils, which are shells mixed across centuries, and the spectacular beds are each many small burials, the Burgess Shale's richest bed holding 26.37 The young-earth side's own Leonard Brand asks how months of decay before burial fit into one year.38
  6. "Restorations are artistic and some fossils were faked, so none of this can be trusted." The order and the gap statistics rest on catalogued occurrences, each tied to a published collection, not on paintings. The frauds were caught by scientists, and the useful lesson from the restorations is narrow: ask which parts are bone. Relative claims survive even where restorations differ threefold, as the rank order of dinosaur masses at above 0.99 shows.49
  7. "The database was built by evolutionists, so its numbers are biased." Every record carries a literature reference and a collection number, so any of them can be checked. The articles report the database's own errors where they found them: a lungfish filed under reptiles, a sponge bound to an insect name, a Neogene shrew still listed as a Triassic mammal.88 They measure its geographic and sampling biases before using any number. And Kurt Wise and Donna Richardson, testing young-earth ideas, used the same database and concluded that the column is real.1
  8. "The geologic column is circular: fossils date the rocks and rocks date the fossils." The paper creationists quote most often for that charge says the column "was put together before evolution was known."70 Its author, J. E. O'Rourke, describes the actual method as induction: after a thousand sections show the same fossils in the same vertical order, the thousand-and-first is arranged in the customary order.70 That is superposition observed many times, and oil companies bet money on it every day.
  9. "A young-earth site that rules against Flood geology on fossil order has given up." The six articles reach different verdicts, and the ones that favour the young-earth side are printed as plainly as the one that does not: the unexplained bound on change, the unreliability of skeletons for ancestry, the real gaps among durable sea animals, the soft-tissue anomaly. The order article gives its reason for printing an uncomfortable result: a reader who finds these facts elsewhere, after reading a version that hid them, has been given every reason to distrust the rest. An unsolved problem is not a refutation of creation. But it is not answered by repeating arguments that the movement's own best scientists have already set aside.
  10. "The completeness article concedes that gaps among shelly sea animals are real, so the gaps argument wins after all." It wins narrowly. The concession covers common, long-lived genera living in seas that were sampled, and the rate behind it is computed only from genera already known on both sides of a stage, so it says nothing about rare, local or short-lived populations.7 The large gaps among shelly animals sit at class and phylum rank where skeletons first appear, and that is the one test the completeness article scores for the young-earth side. On the tests that tell the models apart, fossil order against family trees, the direction in which ranges extend, and the course of discovery, the gaps fall where an incomplete record puts them. And a real gap is not an inversion: it bears on whether intermediates lived, not on the order in Part 1.

Issues and unanswered questions

  1. No young-earth model reproduces the order. This is the central gap, and it is on the young-earth side. The subducted-continent answer to the missing pre-Flood world has a mechanism and a prediction, an accretionary wedge holding the lost continent's debris, but nobody has calculated whether a continent can be pulled down against its own buoyancy in a year, or searched the wedge. Clarey's megasequence database, the only continent-scale young-earth compilation, is not public.67
  2. The pre-Flood population has no defended estimate. The order article searched and found only assertions in both directions. Until someone publishes a number with a method, the small-population answer to the missing human record cannot be priced either way. Nor has any young-earth writer published how many species lived before and after the Flood, so the share of past species a Flood model predicts to be preserved is unknown, and Wise's argument that a short history should preserve a larger share cannot yet be tested.
  3. Both sides extrapolate on soft tissue. No preservation mechanism has been tested for longer than two years, and the decay clocks the young-earth argument uses are extrapolated from heated modern bone and from bones a few thousand years old. An experiment that ran a proposed mechanism long enough to fit a decay curve would move the verdict in one direction or the other.
  4. Nobody has counted which fossil beds are single burials. Snelling's claim that the record is a record of rapid burial and the preservation article's claim that most fossils are mixed shells are both arguments from kinds of deposit, not from a census. The Paleobiology Database's lithology and preservation fields could support one. Nobody on the young-earth side has tried to fit Brett's "very low rates of background sedimentation following the event" into a Flood year.2
  5. Nobody has worked out how many major transitions the record should show. Foote proposed estimating, from completeness, species durations and the number of class- and order-level transitions, how many major transitions an evolutionary history should leave visible, and wrote that this would bear on "whether the small number of documented major transitions provides strong evidence against evolution."68 Both sides cite the question, and neither has answered it.
  6. Where the six articles disagree. Five points, none of which changes a verdict. First, the trends article lists an independent recomputation of Wise and Richardson's boundary statistic as work still to be done; the order article has since done it on the same database, with the result summarised in Part 1.22 Second, the preservation article lists the missing pre-Flood humans among weak absences while the order article calls them the hardest fact; objection 3 settles it by separating bone from worked stone. Third, the order article gives the occurrences below the Neogene as 1,345,826 in its tables and as 1.2 million in parts of its section on the missing human dead, a figure left from an earlier, incomplete download; this page uses the complete figure.16 Fourth, the trends article's share of living families with a fossil record, 72.6% for mammals, 57.2% for birds and 64.4% for lizards and snakes, is lower than the completeness article's 83%, 60% and 69% against the same list of living families.5 The trends count matched names only against families the fossil database itself flags as living, so a living family the database does not flag drops out; the completeness article looked each family up by name directly. The completeness figures are the better ones, so the trends article's range of 47% to 73% runs low; neither count restores Denton's 79% for land vertebrates as a whole. Fifth, the completeness article qualifies this page's own rule. The first five articles said absence is weak in both directions; the completeness article finds it weak for most of the groups the debate is about and strong for durable sea animals at genus and family rank, and this page now states the rule that way. It also scores the class and phylum gaps at the base of the Cambrian for the young-earth side, where the trends article says completeness cannot support any argument about soft-bodied ancestry. The two agree once each claim is read for what it scores: neither says completeness reaches soft-bodied ancestors, and the completeness article's point rests on which prediction fits and on burrows that need no hard parts. On the general claim they agree outright: completeness cannot carry the argument it is usually asked to carry, and its one narrow use is abrupt appearance in durable groups at family rank. Separately, the trends article says that Wise took his doctorate under Gould. Two sources the series has since found confirm that he studied under Gould at Harvard, but neither is the dissertation record, so this page does not rely on the supervision claim.
  7. Sources the articles could not read. Budd and Jensen's 2000 reappraisal of the early animal record and Marshall's 2006 review, for the trends article; Whitmore's 2003 dissertation on fish decay and the full texts of several Burgess, Chengjiang and Mazon Creek papers, read only at abstract level, for the preservation article; Oard's 2025 megasequence exchange, Ross's 2012 boundary paper and Whitcomb and Morris's The Genesis Flood, for the order article; the full 1999 Casineria paper and All Yesterdays, for the fraud article; and the full texts of Benton, Wills and Hitchin 2000, Signor and Lipps 1982, Marshall 1990, Fara 2001 and Wignall and Benton 1999, read at abstract level, with Benton and Storrs 1994 and Paul 1982 not obtained, for the completeness article. Each article names what turns on its gaps.
  8. Questions this section does not cover. The named sequences, such as fish to tetrapod and land mammal to whale, are in Transitional Sequences. Footprints, burrows, nests and coprolites are under Trace Fossils. Claimed out-of-place fossils and human tracks beside dinosaurs are under Claimed Fossil Anomalies. Living fossils and mass extinctions are under Stasis, Extinction, and Evolutionary Tempo. How much rock and time is present at one place is asked in How Complete Is the Geologic Column?, and the gaps between molecular-clock dates and first fossils in Do Clock Dates Agree with the First Fossils?.

Verdict

The fossil record reads well for order.  Which fossils lie above which is measured across two million records, it survives every bias these articles could find, and no claimed exception has survived an audit.  It also reads well for comparisons between groups and intervals.  How complete it is can be measured only group by group, and a missing animal counts as evidence only where that measure is high:  for shelly sea animals at genus and family rank a gap is real, and for insects, soft-bodied animals and most land vertebrates it proves little.  It reads poorly for which fossil descends from which and for the soft parts of a restored animal.  The field says so itself, and the articles quote it saying so.

For young-earth creationism that cuts both ways.  The order is the hardest problem:  working young-earth geologists accept it, but no published model reproduces it, and the absence of any pre-Flood human artefact below the Neogene is the strongest single objection to Flood geology in this section.  Against that, several young-earth claims survive in narrower forms than they are usually given.  Spectacular fossils were sealed fast.  Change in measured fossil series is bounded, and nobody knows why.  Skeletons are a poor guide to ancestry.  Gaps among durable sea animals are real, and the class and phylum gaps where skeletons first appear fit the young-earth prediction better than the evolutionary answer, which depends on ancestors that left little.  And dinosaur soft tissue is a real anomaly that the mainstream has not explained.  None of these dates the rocks, and none touches the order.  The arguments to retire are the ones the articles killed:  rapid burial as a fact about all fossils, completeness as a general proof that gaps are real, with Denton's 79% and Oard's "nearly complete" record, fraud as proof that paleontology cannot be trusted, and radiocarbon in dinosaur bone.  The arguments worth working are the ones still open:  the subducted continent, a census of single-event fossil beds, a young-earth count of species before and after the Flood, the absence of any decline in sampling quality in older rocks, which the young-earth side has not yet used, and a soft-tissue experiment that runs long enough to settle the clock.

  1. The Fossil Record, the section this page belongs to.
  2. Transitional Sequences, the sister section on named fossil sequences.
  3. The Cambrian Explosion, on the sudden appearance of animal body plans.
  4. Living Fossils, on animals whose fossil record seemed to end before they were found alive.
  5. Radiocarbon Dating, on carbon-14 in old material, including dinosaur bone.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Wise, Kurt P., and Donna Richardson.  “What Biostratigraphic Continuity Suggests about Earth History.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9:611–625.  2023.  Their conclusion on the column itself:  “the global biostratigraphic column seems to be real.”  A paper by Kurt Wise, a young-earth creationist with a Harvard paleontology doctorate, and Donna Richardson, doing original quantitative work on the same open database the order article uses.  Their method: at each of 114 globally defined stratigraphic boundaries they computed the number of local stage-straddling species (NLSSS), meaning species occurring in the stage immediately below and immediately above a boundary within two degrees of latitude and longitude of each other, using the Paleobiology Database, a public fossil database, and they checked the counts at 1°, 3° and 4°.  The order article calls it the strongest recent concession from inside the creationist movement, and recomputes its statistic in its Part 6 because the pre-Flood/Flood use does not survive. ↩ ↩ ↩

    1. 1a.

      The authors also report that the order in which the Flood buried fossils bore no relationship to fluctuations in Flood energy, a direct hit on hydrodynamic sorting models from a creationist; they also say that index fossils and sub-erathem stratigraphic units.  “provide no more information about earth history than a relative time scale.”  A relative time scale is precisely what the order article needs, so that sentence is a concession rather than a rebuttal. ↩

  2. 2.

    Brett, Carlton E. et al.  “Mid-Paleozoic trilobite Lagerstätten: models of diagenetically enhanced obrution deposits.”  Palaios 27(5):326–345.  2012.  Brett, of the University of Cincinnati, is the leading authority on Palaeozoic obrution deposits and the co-author, with Seilacher, of the 1991 paper that defined them.

    1. 2a.

      Section Abstract:  “Thus, ironically, the best preservation of delicate remains required rapid burial, associated with mass mortality, and very low rates of background sedimentation following the event.” ↩ ↩

  3. 3.

    Lautenschlager, Stephan.  “Reconstructing the past: methods and techniques for the digital restoration of fossils.”  Royal Society Open Science 3:160342.  2016.  A methods review, not an experiment, of how broken or distorted fossils are rebuilt in computer models, covering remeshing, mirroring damaged parts, duplicating elements, undoing tectonic distortion (retrodeformation) and filling in missing regions.  It concludes that restoration can add a degree of interpretation but still gives useful morphological and functional information.  The fraud article cites it for what each restoration step adds in interpretation.

    1. 3a.

      “The restored model should therefore be regarded as a working hypothesis, which can be amended with the emergence of new data.” ↩

  4. 4.

    Denton, Michael.  Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.  Adler & Adler, Bethesda, MD.  1986.  A critique of evolutionary theory by a physician and biochemist, first published in London in 1985 and the most widely read design-side book of its decade.  Its eighth chapter, "The Fossil Record," argues that neither insufficient search nor the imperfection of the record explains the gaps, using a table of living land-vertebrate families with fossils compiled from Romer's Vertebrate Paleontology of 1966.  Mirror:  Archive.org

    1. 4a.

      Page 189:  “On the other hand, the fact that, when estimates are made of the percentage of living forms found as fossils, the percentage turns out to be surprisingly high, suggesting that the fossil record may not be as bad as is often maintained. Of the 329 living families of terrestrial vertebrates 261 or 79.1% have been found as fossils and, when birds (which are poorly fossilized) are excluded, the percentage rises to 87.8% (see Figure 8.5).” ↩ ↩

  5. 5.

    Computed for the completeness article on 2026-10-20.  Living families of Mammalia, Aves, Squamata, Testudines, Crocodylia and Amphibia were taken from the GBIF backbone taxonomy (accepted names, isExtinct=false), which has no paleontological selection:  657 in all.  Each was looked up by name in the Paleobiology Database taxa list with first-appearance data.  A family is counted as older than the Pleistocene if the whole age bracket of its oldest occurrence lies below the base of the Pleistocene, as Pleistocene-or-Holocene-only if it lies wholly above, and as straddling otherwise;  six bird families straddle.  Results:  mammals 166 of 201 with any record, 151 older than the Pleistocene;  birds 171 of 283, 97;  lizards and snakes 41 of 59, 38;  turtles 13 of 14, 13;  crocodilians 3 of 3, 3;  amphibians 39 of 97, 37.  The 88 families known only from the Pleistocene or Holocene include Lemuridae, Indriidae, Bradypodidae, Hylobatidae, Alcedinidae and Hirundinidae.  Name matching between two taxonomies is exact, so a family filed under another name counts as having no record, and the any-record figures are lower bounds. ↩ ↩ ↩

  6. 6.

    Berean Archive.  “Range gaps in the Paleobiology Database.”  Paleobiology Database.  n.d.  A computed search, by phylum, for genera that disappear from the catalogued record for a stretch and then come back.  Each occurrence is assigned to an ICS stage, and only occurrences whose whole age bracket falls inside a single stage are used, so a loosely dated collection can neither create nor fill a gap.  Of 65,386 distinct genera, 16,804 have occurrences in three or more stages; 1,239,246 occurrences are pinned to one stage and identified to genus, which is 61.9% of the database.  The trends article uses it because a genus that vanishes and returns shows a demonstrated sampling gap: the lineage was provably there on both sides, so no model or estimate is needed. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  7. 7.

    If a genus is found in a given stage with probability P, and the stages are independent, the chance it is found in none of three successive stages is (1 − P)³.  With the three-timer rates computed for the completeness article:  brachiopods, P = 0.831, (0.169)³ = 0.0048, about one in two hundred;  insects, P = 0.353, (0.647)³ = 0.27, about one in four.  The rate is computed from genera already known on both sides of a stage, so it applies to a genus as findable as those, not to a rare or local population. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  8. 8.

    Paleobiology Database.  Paleobiology Database.  n.d.  A public database of published fossil finds, maintained by working paleontologists.  Each occurrence records one taxon in one collection, with a literature reference and an age bracket rather than a single age.  The child articles counted it in full in August 2026, at 2,001,053 occurrences in 277,490 collections, and each prints its own queries.  It records what has been published, so it measures the literature as much as the rocks. ↩

    1. 8a.

      Twenty-four boundary tests, each asking whether any occurrence's entire age bracket falls past the boundary.  Below-first-appearance counts: mammals in Paleozoic rock 0; birds in Triassic or older rock 0; dinosaurs in Paleozoic rock 0; land vertebrates in Silurian or older rock 0; vertebrates and chordates in Precambrian rock 0 each; primates in Early Cretaceous or older rock 0; whales in Mesozoic rock 0; great apes in Eocene or older rock 0; grasses in Jurassic or older rock 0; trilobites in Precambrian rock 0; ammonoids in Ordovician or older rock 0; amniotes in Devonian or older rock 1; insects in Ordovician or older rock 1.  The amniote hit is occurrence 2050687, identified in the database itself as "Dipnoa indet.", a lungfish, in Early Frasnian rock.  The insect hit is occurrence 1661280, Aulocopsis simplex, from the Ordovician Volkhov Formation; Aulocopsis is a sponge genus name bound to an insect homonym.  Above-last-appearance counts total 19, of which 3 are the Mesophyllum coral/alga homonym, 1 is a nomenclatural artifact, 1 shows the test boundary itself was wrong (dendroid graptolites are known into the Carboniferous), and 14 are the two best-known reworking cases in the literature: the Gulf Coast Danian ammonites of the Clayton and Kincaid formations, every one from a collection whose age bracket begins at the boundary itself, and Fort Union theropod material from the Hell Creek transition.  The one genuinely open set is 25 pre-Jurassic angiosperm records, all leaf, seed or dispersed-pollen morphogenera whose affinity is disputed in the primary literature.  A further 85 apparent Paleozoic "flowering plants" are form taxa and vanish entirely under the database's regular-preservation filter, so anyone quoting a raw count without that filter is quoting a filing convention. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. 8b.

      The taxon record for Tikitherium copei is txn:177642, with attribution.  “Datta 2005”.  , class Mammalia, 237–227.3 Ma, interval Carnian.  The one occurrence of the genus, occ:1689327, is in the Tiki Formation, Carnian, class Mammalia.  The reference attached to that occurrence, ref:91378, has the title.  “Putative Triassic stem mammal Tikitherium copei is a Neogene shrew”.  , by Averianov and Voyta, Journal of Mammalian Evolution 31(1), 2024.  The same run gives the first appearance of Mammalia and Mammaliaformes as 239.48–237 Ma (Ladinian), and Gondwanadon tapani as Morganucodontidae at Carnian 237–227.3 Ma.  When rechecked, the Ladinian Mammaliaformes query returns a single occurrence, occ:1455756, Theria sp. from the Muschelkalk at 239.48–237 Ma, so the group's first appearance in the database is not one of the Tiki teeth, and removing them would not move it.  This is not a criticism of the database's curators, who are volunteers; it is a demonstration that a database inherits errors with a lag. ↩ ↩

  9. 9.

    Macrostrat.  Macrostrat API v2.  n.d.  Overall, the database holds 35,481 rock units across 1,534 stratigraphic columns.  Each of the North America project's 24,141 rock units has a name, top and bottom ages, maximum and minimum thicknesses, lithology, an interpreted depositional environment, and a count of Paleobiology Database occurrences.  A database of rock units and stratigraphic columns.  Its North America project holds 949 columns covering 24.8 million km² and 24,141 rock units, and the order article compares that footprint with the 26.6 million km² Clarey reports for the same continent.  The order article uses it because it is gathered by a different community for a different purpose from Clarey's maps, and the two footprints agree to within 7%. ↩

  10. 10.

    Computed for the completeness article from a whole-database Paleobiology Database download of 2026-10-20 (occs/list with pres=regular, which drops footprint names and form taxa, and show=coords,class,env):  1,902,080 occurrences, 1,767,478 identified to a genus, 1,135,829 of those with an age bracket lying wholly inside one of the 101 ICS stages.  Genus ranges run from first to last occupied stage.  The three-timer rate is Alroy's:  in each stage, genera found in the stages before and after it, and the share of those also found in it.  Range-through completeness is genera found in a stage divided by genera whose range spans it, reported with and without the first and last stage of each range.  A Lazarus gap is a run of unoccupied stages inside a range of three or more stages.  Collections are grouped as marine and marginal-marine or as land and fresh water from the database's environment field.  Groups follow the database's classification;  some dinosaur families are filed under Reptilia and others under Ornithischia or Saurischia, so the three are counted together.  The share of the dump held by molluscs, brachiopods, echinoderms, corals and bryozoans is 827,136 occurrences, 43.5%;  foraminifera 196,028, 10.3%.  No duration in years is used. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  11. 11.

    Berean Archive.  “Sampling and geographic bias in the Paleobiology Database.”  Paleobiology Database.  n.d.  A count of all 277,490 collections by country and by phylum, run to measure how lopsided the sampling is.  The United States holds 62,063 (22.37%), China 15,314 (5.52%), Canada 14,895 (5.37%), an ocean-basin code 12,354 (4.45%), Russia 11,481 (4.14%), the United Kingdom 9,158 (3.30%), Australia 8,723 (3.14%), France 8,489 (3.06%), Spain 6,881 (2.48%) and Germany 6,114 (2.20%).  The top three hold 33.26%, the top five 41.85%, the top ten 56.91% and the top twenty 72.96%, and the Gini coefficient across 255 country codes is 0.861.  By phylum, five phyla hold 68.3% of all occurrences: Mollusca 502,370 (25.11%), Chordata 313,680 (15.68%), Foraminifera 196,749 (9.83%), Brachiopoda 187,542 (9.37%) and Arthropoda 167,040 (8.35%).  Only 47.8% of occurrences are resolved to species and 41.6% to genus, so a claim about ordering at genus rank rests on 89.4% of the database.  The trends article uses it because every number that depends on the database has to be discounted for this bias. ↩

    1. 11a.

      Over the 99 ICS stages with at least ten stage-pinned collections, Pearson r(collections, genera) = 0.645; Spearman ρ(collections, genera) = 0.757; Pearson r on log10 of both = 0.851; and Spearman ρ(occurrences, genera) = 0.888.  Sampling density spans four orders of magnitude, from 21 occurrences per million years in the earliest Cambrian to 305,013 per million years in the Late Pleistocene. ↩

  12. 12.

    “Occurrence counts per geologic period for 56 major groups, from the Paleobiology Database.”  Paleobiology Database.  Aug 8, 2026.  A research table of fossil occurrence counts for 56 major groups in each geologic period, built by the order article from the database's diversity endpoint.  Thirteen groups are marked with a dagger because their raw first-appearance period was pulled apart record by record in Part 3 of the order article.  Eleven were overturned there, and every correction moves a first appearance later.  The two that were not overturned are Chondrichthyes, whose Ordovician scale taxa are genuine but of contested affinity, and Cycadophyta, whose two Silurian Harringtonia records could not be resolved.  One row is flagged as stale: on the complete data the raw first appearance of Coccolithophyceae moves from the Jurassic to a single Permian record, an anomalous first-appearance datum that has not been audited, so until it is, the row prints the pre-correction figures.  The order article uses the table to show that the order is a strict staircase not built on lucky finds. ↩

  13. 13.

    Tally of the out-of-order fossil audits in the order article.  n.d.  A scorecard of 29 claimed out-of-order fossils, made up of 12 anomalously early first-appearance datums audited record by record, 5 famous claimed out-of-order fossils, and 12 group results from the exhaustive sweep, where the two non-zero rows are counted as anomalies to be judged.  The count is not a claim that all 2,001,053 occurrences have been checked for every possible order violation; that would need a full range-consistency check on every genus, and it has not been run here.  The order article states what the count licenses and what it does not, and asks that the number be quoted with that qualification attached. ↩

  14. 14.

    Computed for the order article from the Paleobiology Database on 3 August 2026, counting the North American brachiopod and bivalve genera sampled in each geologic period.  The ratio of brachiopod to bivalve genera is 32.7 in the Cambrian and 0.033 in the Quaternary, a swing of about 990-fold, and no period reverses the direction of travel.  Trilobite genera over the same series run 519, 404, 155, 85, 39, 14 and then zero. ↩

  15. 15.

    “Occurrence counts for the genus Homo and the family Hominidae in the Paleobiology Database.”  Paleobiology Database.  Aug 8, 2026.  The database's counts of fossil occurrences for the genus Homo: 238 in all, Pliocene 7, Pleistocene 191 and Holocene 40, with zero below the Pliocene.  The family Hominidae has 619 occurrences, the oldest from the Miocene (170 in the Neogene and 449 in the Quaternary, in the period-level table).  The order article sets these counts against the denominator of 1,345,826 occurrences below the Neogene, so the human count there is zero. ↩ ↩

  16. 16.

    “Occurrence counts by geologic period for all life, from the Paleobiology Database.”  Paleobiology Database.  Aug 8, 2026.  Counts of fossil occurrences for all life in each geologic block, from the database's diversity endpoint.  Precambrian (Orosirian through Ediacaran) holds 3,259 occurrences and Paleozoic (Cambrian through Permian) 548,543.  Everything below the Neogene holds 1,345,826, which is the Precambrian and Paleozoic totals plus Triassic 105,220, Jurassic 172,952, Cretaceous 248,292 and Paleogene 267,560.  The order article uses these totals as its denominators: when it says a group is absent from Paleozoic rock, it means absent from 548,543 chances to appear. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

  17. 17.

    Thomas, Brian.  “Pre-Flood Human Fossils Revisited.”  Institute for Creation Research.  Oct 30, 2015.  An article by Brian Thomas of the Institute for Creation Research, published 30 October 2015.  It lists seven answers to the absence of pre-Flood human remains, of which five are assessed individually in Part 4 of the order article: a small pre-Flood population limited by violence, pulverisation by underwater mudflows and receding water, dilution across the world's sediments, burial of entire ancient continents, and investigator bias.  The order article uses it for ICR's own admission about the human remains and for its verdict on the coal artifacts.

    1. 17a.

      “we know of no undisputed human skeletal remains in Flood rocks”.  The same admission is made in different words by Answers in Genesis.  It is printed here because the sense is not in dispute. ↩

  18. 18.

    Paleobiology Database and Macrostrat.  Paleobiology Database occurrences in Macrostrat units, split by marine and non-marine environment.  n.d.  Paleobiology Database occurrences carried by Macrostrat units, split by the interpreted depositional environment of the enclosing unit.  Mixed and unknown environments are excluded from the shares.  The non-marine share of classified occurrences by megasequence is Sauk 0.0% (19,776 marine, 0 non-marine), Tippecanoe 0.1% (83,376 / 106), Kaskaskia 1.7% (63,786 / 1,103), Absaroka 5.6% (99,168 / 5,874), Zuni 23.3% (47,630 / 14,438) and Tejas 45.0% (68,240 / 55,760).  The shares are monotone across six intervals, spanning a factor of several hundred.  The same split by sediment volume gives 0.0, 0.2, 11.8, 20.0, 16.4 and 59.1 percent, which is not monotone; that difference is worth noticing, and the fossil result is the strong one.  The order article uses it as the one young-earth prediction that independent data confirm: ecological zonation predicts a succession from marine to terrestrial fossils up the column. ↩

  19. 19.

    Tomkins, Jeffrey P., and Timothy L. Clarey.  “Developing a Comprehensive Model of Global Flood Paleontology: Integrating the Biostratigraphic Record with Global Megasequence Deposition.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9:561–587.  2023.  A 2023 paper by the two authors of a Flood model, setting out how the biostratigraphic record fits global megasequence deposition.  The order article uses it for the authors' own concessions about pollen, about the Sauk, Tippecanoe and Kaskaskia megasequences, and about the trackways, and for their account of mobile animals.

    1. 19a.

      Page 565:  “Questions about why distinctly different fossil assemblages are found in the Sauk, Tippecanoe and Kaskaskia Megasequences remain, even though all are dominantly marine.” ↩

  20. 20.

    Chadwick, Arthur V.  “Precambrian Pollen in the Grand Canyon: A Reexamination.”  Origins.  2009.  A creationist's re-examination of the claim that Precambrian pollen occurs in the Grand Canyon, here in a 2009 web version of a 1981 study.  The original is Chadwick 1981 in Origins 8:7–12, with a follow-up in 1982.  Chadwick is a creationist, then at Loma Linda and later at Southwestern Adventist University, who went to the canyon with Burdick in 1971 under a National Park Service permit and re-sampled on three further trips.  The order article cites it as a creationist who did the careful work, got a negative result and published it. ↩ ↩

  21. 21.

    Morris, John D.  “The Paluxy River Mystery.”  Impact No. 151, Acts & Facts 15(1).  Jan 1, 1986.  An article published on 1 January 1986 in the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) Impact series, in which the author withdraws the Paluxy man-track claim.  The author, who later became ICR's president, had written the 1980 book Tracking Those Incredible Dinosaurs and the People Who Knew Them, one of the two main vehicles for the claim.  It is a primary retraction by its promoter, not a critic's characterisation, and the order article cites it for that reason. ↩ ↩

  22. 22.

    NLSSS recomputed on the Paleobiology Database.  Aug 8, 2026.  The database held 2,001,027 occurrences at the time of the run.  The 114 boundaries rebuild exactly, which is the check that the ladder is right: 15 Precambrian units, then 100 Phanerozoic stages, being the database's 101 stage-level intervals with the three Holocene subdivisions merged into one Holocene and the Pridoli, which the database files as an epoch and the international chart as a stage, reinserted.  Their published Table 1 was transcribed by hand, so that every comparison is against printed numbers rather than a description of them.  An analysis run for the order article that applies Wise and Richardson's NLSSS statistic to the same database, with the same 114 boundaries and every ambiguity in their method run both ways.  The order article uses it to test the statistic: the statistic reproduces, but their Cambrian numbers are wrong. ↩ ↩

    1. 22a.

      Rarefaction as implemented: for each boundary, draw 100 species-bearing fossil collections at random from the unit below and 100 from the unit above, recompute the straddling count on that subsample, and average over 40 replicates, seed 20260808.  Boundaries that cannot meet the quota on either side return nothing, which removes 16 of the 25 Precambrian–Cambrian boundaries and none elsewhere.  Quotas of 50 and 200 give the same ratios: Pennsylvanian–Permian against Ordovician–Mississippian 0.81 and 1.21, Cenozoic against Mesozoic 2.30 and 1.98.  Rank-sum tests on the raw counts: Pennsylvanian–Permian against Ordovician–Mississippian, ratio 2.58, p = 0.0013; after rarefaction, ratio 0.98, p = 0.86.  Cenozoic against Mesozoic, ratio 2.12 raw and 2.18 rarefied, p = 0.0002.  Precambrian–Cambrian against Ordovician–Mississippian, ratio 0.17 raw, p < 0.0001; rarefied 0.67, p = 0.54.  Correlations of the raw count against effort: 0.887 against the smaller of the two species-level occurrence totals, 0.848 against paired two-degree cells, 0.806 against the smaller of the two collection totals.  The comparable figure for the whole database is a Spearman correlation of 0.888 between apparent diversity and collecting effort, from the order article's note on sampling bias. ↩

  23. 23.

    Hunt, Gene et al.  “Data from: Simple versus complex models of trait evolution and stasis as a response to environmental change.”  Dryad Digital Repository.  2015.  The authors' deposit of 771 ancestor-descendant trait series from the fossil record, with a metadata table carrying lineage, taxon, trait type, environment, source study and sample count, and a list of source publications; the trends article analysed the 709 series with seven or more samples.  The authors printed four percentages and a set of regressions but never published the table behind them, so the trends article refitted all 709 sequences from this deposit and printed that table.

    1. 23a.

      The full model breakdown of the top row, which is the 62 sequences with more than 40 samples, is punctuation 32.3%, random-walk-to-stasis 35.5%, stasis-to-random-walk 11.3%, directional-to-stasis 9.7%, stasis-to-directional 6.5%, pure directional 3.2%, unbiased random walk 1.6%, stasis 0.0% and strict stasis 0.0%.  The structural caveat is real: the four mode-shift models and the punctuation model require at least 14 samples, so the 321 sequences in the thinnest bin were never offered a complex model, and their 45.5% stasis is a win over three rivals rather than eight.  The comparison this does not affect is between the 21–40 bin and the bin above it: both were offered all nine models, and stasis falls from 46.5% to 8.7% between them. ↩

  24. 24.

    Uyeda, Josef C. et al.  “The million-year wait for macroevolutionary bursts.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(38):15908–15913.  2011.  “we find a complete absence of a time-span effect up to ∼1 Myr, but this pattern then yields to a pattern of increasing divergence on timescales above 1–10 Myr.”  The segmented regression breakpoint is at 104.82 years, about 66,000.  The best-fitting model was multiple-burst, with an expected waiting time to displacement of the adaptive optimum above 10 Myr and an ancestor-to-descendant size ratio per burst of about 1.28.  A research paper that pools more than 8,000 body-size measurements of mammals, lizards and snakes, and birds, spanning 0.2 years to 357 million years and drawn from field studies, historical records, fossil series, and family trees of living species, then fits mathematical models with random chance built in.  The trends article uses it to show where stasis (long spells with little change) ends: change does not accumulate up to about a million years, and divergence grows after that.

    1. 24a.

      “We conclude that some unspecified process of bounded evolution is responsible for the band we observe in our data (Fig. 1).”  They list the models ruled out by Estes and Arnold and add:  “All of these models fail either because they require unrealistic values for microevolutionary processes or because bounded evolution is difficult to achieve under any set of parameter values.” ↩

  25. 25.

    Foote, Michael.  “The Evolution of Morphological Diversity.”  Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 28:129–152.  1997.  Page 131:  Variance-based measures are preferred because they are insensitive to sample size, whereas range-based measures grow monotonically with it and are therefore biased by preservation.  The standard review of the field, by Michael Foote of the University of Chicago, on how biologists measure morphological diversity, which is the spread of body forms rather than the number of species.  It sets out the machinery: build a character matrix from continuous measurements or discrete homologous characters; compute pairwise dissimilarities and ordinate them by principal coordinates or principal components; measure the spread with a sum of variances, a sum of ranges, a mean pairwise distance or an occupied volume; optionally measure patristic rather than phenetic distance; then bin by time and summarise the trajectory.  The trends article uses it for that method and for the limits Foote states himself.

    1. 25a.

      Page 130:  “The extent of morphological divergence among taxa generally increases with taxonomic rank (e.g. 16–18, 36, 42, 44, 59, 173, 175), so secular changes in the number of higher taxa (generally, phyla, classes, and orders) provide an obvious index of disparity.”  Foote's references 16–18, 173 and 175 are the Cherry, Case and Wilson body-shape literature, whose point is that morphological divergence is badly decoupled from genetic divergence across distant groups: frogs in different genera differ less in body shape than humans do from chimpanzees.  Findley 1979, Science 204: 434–435, is a published dissent from that analysis. ↩

    2. 25b.

      Page 143:  “Clearly, how fully a morphospace is occupied is potentially very sensitive to the choice of traits (83). …  Even if this does not allow us to say that diatoms are more diverse morphologically than dinosaurs, it does allow us to address whether morphospace was filled more gradually or abruptly in one group versus another.” ↩

  26. 26.

    Berean Archive.  “Sister-taxon stratigraphic gaps.”  Paleobiology Database.  n.d.  A computed measure of how long a taxon's first appearance trails its nearest sister, across the animal kingdom (Metazoa) at every rank from species to phylum.  Every accepted taxon inside Metazoa, leaving out form taxa and ichnotaxa, is grouped by its immediate parent; for each parent with two or more dated children, the gap runs from the oldest child's first appearance to the second oldest's, with every age bracket taken in the direction least favourable to a gap, and the result floored at zero.  "Sister" here means "shares an immediate parent in the database," which is a classification relationship, not a phylogenetic one.  The trends article uses it because nobody in this dispute appears to have measured the stratigraphic gap at each rank. ↩

  27. 27.

    Springer, Mark S. et al.  “The Adequacy of Morphology for Reconstructing the Early History of Placental Mammals.”  Systematic Biology 56(4):673–684.  2007.  Table 1:  Table 1 lists the superordinal groups that morphology had proposed, including Edentata with Xenarthra and Pholidota.  The bone matrix is the 185 osteological characters of Asher et al. 2003, which the paper calls "the largest currently available morphological data set to include representatives of all extant orders of placental mammals."  A "Points of View" position article in which the team tests whether skeletal data alone can recover the relationships of the placental mammal orders.  The team treated each living order as if it were extinct, which the paper calls pseudoextinction, leaving that order with only its skeletal data as a fossil would have, and compared the resulting trees with trees built from 20 nuclear gene segments for 53 placental taxa.  The trends article calls it an experiment with a known answer: the skeletal data failed to recover the four-clade tree that DNA supports.

    1. 27a.

      Section Conclusions, page 682:  “We show that as many as 72% of the living placental orders move to a different superordinal group when molecular data are missing and that four of the 18 orders are rendered poly- or paraphyletic.  Superordinal groups are never recovered as monophyletic when treated as pseudoextinct. …  These results suggest that morphological studies of eutherian interordinal relationships have failed to separate homology and homoplasy and have consistently been misled by the latter.”  72% is 13 of 18; the five that stayed put are rodents, lagomorphs, tree shrews, sirenians and proboscideans (p. 679).  The individual placements and support values in the trends article's table are from Tables 3 and 4. ↩

  28. 28.

    Pisani, Davide et al.  “Congruence of morphological and molecular phylogenies.”  Acta Biotheoretica 55(3):269–281.  2007.  “Molecular trees have higher average congruence than morphological trees, but the difference is not significant, and both within- and between-partition incongruence is much lower than expected by chance alone.  Our results suggest that both molecular and morphological trees are, in general, useful approximations of a common underlying phylogeny and thus, when molecules and morphology clash, molecular phylogenies should not be considered more reliable a priori.”  A comparison of 181 published family trees built from molecules with 49 built from morphology, each pair of trees tested for how far they agree.  Morphological trees agreed less well on average, but not significantly less, and both kinds agreed far more often than chance.  The trends article calls it the broadest survey of the question and gives its finding that morphology is worse but not significantly worse, which is the strongest single statement against the trends article's own thesis. ↩

  29. 29.

    Foote, Michael et al.  “Completeness of the known graptoloid palaeontological record.”  Journal of the Geological Society 176:1038–1055.  2019.  “2800 or more”.  against about 2,200 documented, implying 79% sampled.  The trends article uses the 75% figure as its clade-level example of sampling, and uses Foote's own wording on what that figure means.  Section Abstract:  The abstract, verbatim:  “We estimate that c. 75% of species in the geographical regions that contribute to the stratigraphic data have been sampled and that, of those species known from more than a single stratigraphic horizon, c. 85% of their original durations, on average, are represented by their global composite stratigraphic ranges.”  A study of how complete the record of graptoloid species is, which the trends article calls the most rigorous single-clade completeness study in the literature.  It estimates that about 75% of species in the regions that contribute to the stratigraphic data have been sampled, and that about 85% of the original durations of species known from more than one horizon are represented in their global ranges.  The figure is independently corroborated by Sadler and colleagues (2011), who worked from a different version of the same dataset by a completely different method and put total graptoloid diversity at.

    1. 29a.

      “It is important to emphasize that the relevant pool of species consists of those that lived in the regions represented by the preserved sections actually sampled.  No doubt there were many species living only in areas that have no known record …  So, when we estimate that 75% of species have been sampled, we mean 75% of those species that had the potential to be represented in light of where sediment was accumulating in the past, has survived to the present day and has been studied.  Moreover, our conclusions regarding the integrated global record of graptoloids are not meant to imply that local and regional records approach the global record in terms of completeness.”  The trends article says this sentence dissolves a contradiction in its own earlier notes, and that Foote states it in his own best case. ↩

    2. 29b.

      Section Discussion, pages 1050–1051, table 8:  The trends article's cross-group calibration figures come from this discussion, with the sources Foote and colleagues cite:  marine animal genera at about 0.5 sampling probability per genus per stage (Foote 2003 and Foote and Sepkoski 1999); selected Ordovician groups at 0.6–0.8 per 8 Myr interval (Connolly and Miller 2001); database genera at 78% per stage by Alroy's three-timer method; North American Cenozoic mammal species at 88% sampled and 77% of duration preserved, from Alroy's composite, in their own Table 8; and Cretaceous mammal species at about 10% (Foote et al. 1999).  The authors note that Alroy's data.  “are also high-graded – for example, by eliminating taxa known from just a single faunal list.”  Their explanation of the Cretaceous-versus-Cenozoic mammal difference is:  “The difference is not surprising in light of, for example, the larger ecological footprint of Cenozoic mammal species and the general loss of terrestrial records with increasing geological age.” ↩ ↩

  30. 30.

    Žliobaitė, Indrė, and Mikael Fortelius.  “On calibrating the completometer for the mammalian fossil record.”  Paleobiology 48(1):1–11.  2022.  A paper that tests how complete the mammal fossil record is for the Miocene, about 18 million years, as named fossil species divided by species inferred to have lived, which the trends article uses to show how the denominator changes the answer.  That inferred figure is built from present-day standing diversity: today's 6,363 living mammal species, multiplied by the number of species turnovers at a mean species duration of about 1 Myr, giving roughly 121,000 expected against 4,505 named, or about 4%; Sensitivity: a 3 Myr duration raises it to about 10%, and a 0.5 Myr duration lowers it to about 2%.  Per order, the figures are Proboscidea 212%, Perissodactyla 140%, Artiodactyla 14.0%, Carnivora 12.6%, Lagomorpha 6.5%, Eulipotyphla 3.4%, Rodentia 2.9%, Primates 1.4%, Chiroptera 0.3%.  The two impossible values above 100% are the paper's own internal evidence that its constant-standing-diversity assumption fails, because modern proboscidean and perissodactyl diversity is a fraction of what it was, and the 4% inherits that. ↩ ↩

  31. 31.

    Berean Archive.  “Collector's curves for fourteen clades.”  Paleobiology Database.  n.d.  Counts of genus names by naming year for fourteen clades, with accepted extinct genera only and an analysis cutoff of 2023, because name entry lags publication.  Ichnotaxa (footprint names) and form taxa (eggshell and isolated-tooth names) are left out, along with junior synonyms and nomina dubia, because they otherwise inflate the dinosaur genus count by about half: Dinosauria returns 3,213 genus records unfiltered and 1,592 filtered.  Taxa the database does not flag extinct are dropped as well, because a group with living members otherwise carries genera named by Linnaeus from living specimens, which back-loads the eighteenth century with names that have nothing to do with fossil discovery.  The trends article uses the curves to show that dinosaur discovery is still accelerating while trilobite discovery has nearly stopped, and as a ranking of how mature each search is, not as a measure of what is left. ↩ ↩

    1. 31a.

      Restricted by continent, with birds, form taxa and ichnotaxa excluded.  Database counts of accepted, extinct, regular-taxon non-avian dinosaur genera by naming year: 390 by 1990, 564 by 2000, 727 by 2006, 896 by 2010, 1,108 by 2015, 1,331 by 2020, 1,436 by 2023, and 1,534 in total.  New genera per year 1994–2025: 17, 12, 19, 12, 26, 29, 22, 28, 13, 28, 31, 36, 27, 39, 23, 46, 61, 49, 33, 46, 47, 37, 36, 46, 39, 55, 47, 43, 34, 28, 44, 36.  Wang & Dodson's 527 and the database's 727 are not the same count and must not be reported as one series, because Wang and Dodson worked from a stricter hand-vetted list and rejected genera the database marks accepted. ↩

  32. 32.

    Berean Archive.  What the paleontologists actually said.  n.d.  The quotation audit for the fossil-record series, with every verdict and every failure, covering 236 passages across eleven separate audits.  The trends article points readers to it as a companion page that includes the failures. ↩ ↩

  33. 33.

    Snelling, Andrew A.  Earth's Catastrophic Past: Geology, Creation & the Flood.  Institute for Creation Research, Dallas.  2009.  Two volumes.  Snelling is a geologist (PhD, University of Sydney) and the director of research at Answers in Genesis;  this is the most systematic young-earth treatment of Flood geology in print, and its chapters 68 to 73 are the fullest young-earth statement of the fossilisation argument.

    1. 33a.

      Page 609:  “The presence of so many fossils, often preserved in exquisite detail, throughout the geologic record on every continent, are testimony to the rapid burial of countless animals and plants during the catastrophic sedimentation of these strata.”  Item 3, "Fossil graveyards," in his summary of the evidence for catastrophic sedimentation. ↩

    2. 33b.

      Page 731:  “Even a cursory examination of the fossils preserved in the strata of the geologic record reveals that the vast majority of them by number are the remains of shallow-water marine invertebrates (brachiopods, bivalves, gastropods, corals, graptolites, echinoderms, crustaceans, ammonites, etc.).”  Under the heading "Early Burial of Marine Creatures" in chapter 90. ↩

  34. 34.

    Allison, Peter A.  “The role of anoxia in the decay and mineralization of proteinaceous macro-fossils.”  Paleobiology 14(2):139–154.  1988.  The experiments that overturned the stagnant-water explanation of soft-bodied preservation:  worm and crustacean carcasses buried in airtight jars of marine, brackish and lake sediment and followed for 25 weeks.

    1. 34a.

      Section Abstract:  “Decay processes were active in the experimental conditions despite anoxia and had virtually destroyed the carcasses within 25 weeks. However, decay-rate in the sulfate-reducing marine system was greater than in the methanogenic freshwater environments.” ↩

  35. 35.

    Kowalewski, Michał et al.  “One fossil record, multiple time resolutions: Disparate time-averaging of echinoids and mollusks on a Holocene carbonate platform.”  Geology 46(1):51–54.  Jan 2018.  Thirty sand-dollar tests and thirty clam valves from one patch of a Bahamian sand flat, dated individually.

    1. 35a.

      Section Abstract:  “All echinoid tests yielded post-bomb (taking into account radiocarbon from nuclear weapons testing) ages, and the estimated time-averaging (interquartile age range) is at most 2 yr. In contrast, sympatric mollusk valves spanned 4000 yr with an estimated time-averaging of 1830 yr.”  “differences in intrinsic skeletal durability may be the main determinant of the temporal resolution of fossil assemblages.” ↩

  36. 36.

    Kidwell, Susan M., and Steven M. Holland.  “The quality of the fossil record: implications for evolutionary analyses.”  Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 33:561–588.  2002.  The standard review of fossil-record completeness and resolution;  Kidwell, of the University of Chicago, is the leading authority on time-averaging and live-dead fidelity in shelly faunas.

    1. 36a.

      Page 566:  “net rates of stratigraphic accumulation are commonly slow relative to the life span of individual organisms. Consequently, the skeletal remains of multiple generations typically become mixed within a single bed. This time-averaging of local but noncontemporaneous remains is pervasive in the fossil record: It explains why fossilized individuals are rarely found in their original life orientations, but instead are rotated and disarticulated”. ↩

  37. 37.

    Caron, Jean-Bernard, and Donald A. Jackson.  “Taphonomy of the Greater Phyllopod Bed community, Burgess Shale.”  Palaios 21(5):451–465.  2006.  A bed-by-bed census of more than 50,000 Walcott Quarry specimens by the Royal Ontario Museum's Burgess Shale curator.

    1. 37a.

      Section Abstract:  “variation in fossil preservation was analyzed through a vertical succession of 26 bed assemblages, each representing a single obrution event, within the 7-m-thick Greater Phyllopod Bed of the Walcott Quarry. More than 50,000 specimens belonging to 158 genera”. ↩ ↩

  38. 38.

    Brand, Leonard, and Arthur Chadwick.  Faith, Reason, & Earth History: A Paradigm of Earth and Biological Origins by Intelligent Design.  Andrews University Press, Berrien Springs.  3rd edition.  2018.  Brand is a Loma Linda University palaeontologist who has published taphonomic field and laboratory work in Geology, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology and the Journal of Taphonomy while holding a young-earth position.  The book's chapter 18, "Evidence for Short-Age Geology," contains its taphonomy section;  page numbers are from the book's own index.

    1. 38a.

      Chapter 18, section Taphonomy, page 462:  “The other side of taphonomic data also needs to be considered. If at least the Paleozoic and Mesozoic were deposited within a year, with systematic ecological processes killing and burying organisms, then most animals must have been buried very soon after death—within hours or days. The problem with such consistently rapid burial is that it should have preserved mostly intact, articulated specimens. However, the vertebrate fossil record includes many examples of disarticulated, scattered bones and teeth. Most of these disarticulated remains probably required several weeks or months of decay and disarticulation before burial. Is it possible to fit many episodes of several months of disarticulation into a one-year Cambrian to Cretaceous process?” ↩ ↩ ↩

  39. 39.

    Behrensmeyer, Anna K. et al.  “Taphonomy and paleobiology.”  Paleobiology 26(sp4):103–147.  2000.  The Paleontological Society's millennium review of the field, by its three leading practitioners for bones, shells and plants respectively.

    1. 39a.

      Page 121:  “Soft-bodied taxa have negligible preservation potential under ordinary environmental conditions, such as oxygenated seafloors and lake beds, and land surfaces characterized by moist and/or warm conditions (see earlier section), and the destruction of these organisms can represent a substantial loss in biological information. In marine sands and muds, for example, such taxa constitute 30–100% of species”. ↩ ↩

  40. 40.

    Sansom, Robert S., and Matthew A. Wills.  “Fossilization causes organisms to appear erroneously primitive by distorting evolutionary trees.”  Scientific Reports 3:2545.  2013.  Simulated fossilisation across 78 published morphological data sets of living animals, more than 2,000 taxa.

    1. 40a.

      Page 2, figure 1:  “61% of 491 taxa shift significantly down phylogenies, from their original position toward the root, vs 39% which shift significantly up”. ↩ ↩

  41. 41.

    Rana, Fazale.  Dinosaur Blood and the Age of the Earth.  RTB Press, Covina CA.  2016.  A popular book by Fazale Rana, a biochemist with Reasons to Believe, an old-earth (day-age) Christian ministry.  Its stated purpose is to explain why soft tissue can be preserved in fossils several hundred million years old.  The soft-tissue article uses it for Rana's concession that the soft tissue is authentic, and for the decay figures and claims he reports.  The ISBN is 978-1-886653-18-4.

    1. 41a.

      Page 30:  “it does indeed appear that the soft tissue remnants isolated from a wide range of fossilized specimens are authentic endogenous materials, despite the protests of some skeptical paleontologists.” ↩

    2. 41b.

      Page 72:  “The existence in fossils of materials derived from blood vessels, cells, and biomolecules is fully compatible with an old-earth view and in no way validates YEC.” ↩

  42. 42.

    Buckley, Michael et al.  “Comment on 'Protein Sequences from Mastodon and Tyrannosaurus rex Revealed by Mass Spectrometry'.”  Science 319:33.  2008.  A comment in Science by 27 authors on the 2007 study of T. rex proteins.  It argues that the thermal age of Hell Creek bone, the total heat it has absorbed over time, at a burial temperature of about 20 °C makes collagen recovery implausible.  By its estimate, the bone would lose all but 1% of its collagen in roughly 14,000 years.  It accepts the result for the cold-buried mastodon.  The soft-tissue article uses its estimate of collagen survival at Hell Creek's temperature. ↩ ↩

  43. 43.

    The soft-tissue article's arithmetic on the estimate of Buckley and colleagues 42.  If collagen at Hell Creek's burial temperature falls to 1% in about 14,000 years, its half-life is about 2,000 years.  Ten kilograms of collagen is about 2×1022 molecules, which is only about 74 half-lives above a single molecule, or about 150,000 years.  Sixty-eight million years is about 34,000 half-lives.  The calculation assumes the decay rate of unaltered collagen;  whether that rate still applies to chemically altered material is the dispute over preservation mechanisms. ↩

  44. 44.

    Dalén, Love et al.  “Deep-time paleogenomics and the limits of DNA survival.”  Science.  2023.  A Science paper on how far back DNA can be recovered.  The oldest reconstructed genome comes from a 1–2-Myr mammoth.  The oldest isolated DNA comes from ~2-Myr Greenland sediment, which is the empirical ceiling on DNA survival and ~30× younger than dinosaurs.  The soft-tissue article uses it to show how old the oldest genome and the oldest DNA actually are.  Mirror:  PMC ↩

  45. 45.

    Schweitzer, Mary H. et al.  “A role for iron and oxygen chemistry in preserving soft tissues, cells and molecules from deep time.”  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281:20132741.  2014.  “increased tissue stability more than 200-fold, from approximately 3 days to more than two years at room temperature (25°C)”.  A laboratory experiment that used ostrich blood vessels as a model and tested how purified hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in blood, affects how long tissue lasts at room temperature.  The experiment also used K3EDTA, an anticoagulant that stops blood from clotting, and the authors found goethite, an iron mineral, on fossil tissues.  The soft-tissue article uses it for the proposal that iron released from blood after death drives chemical cross-linking, like formaldehyde in a specimen jar. ↩

  46. 46.

    Lindgren, Johan et al.  “Microspectroscopic Evidence of Cretaceous Bone Proteins.”  PLoS ONE 6(4):e19445.  2011.  The fibrils.  “differ significantly in spectral signature”.  from bacterial biofilms.  The study also measured the radiocarbon in the 70-million-year-old bone, finding.  “4.68%±0.1 of modern 14C activity”.  and attributed it to.  “bacterial activity near the outer surface.”  A study of microscopic structures in a mosasaur (an extinct marine reptile) bone.  It found collagen antibodies and 67 nm D-periodicity, the repeating banding pattern of collagen.  The soft-tissue article uses it for the collagen result, and for the radiocarbon measurement that the authors attribute to contamination. ↩

  47. 47.

    Weiner, J. S. et al.  “The Solution of the Piltdown Problem.”  Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Geology 2(3):139–146.  Nov 21, 1953.  A 1953 paper by three scientists that tested the Piltdown material for artificial abrasion, fluorine, nitrogen and staining, and put forward the fraud hypothesis as the only possible solution.  The fraud article uses it to show that the exposure was a test, not a rumour, through four independent lines of evidence.

    1. 47a.

      The paper's final paragraph. It is the passage that most damages the apologetic use of Piltdown, and creationist treatments most often leave it out. ↩

  48. 48.

    Rowe, Timothy B. et al.  “X-ray computed tomography datasets for forensic analysis of vertebrate fossils.”  Scientific Data 3:160040.  2016.  A data paper that publishes CT scans of three fossils from Early Cretaceous lake deposits in Liaoning, China: a Confuciusornis slab that was shattered and reconstructed with relatively minor errors, the so-called Archaeoraptor, a chimaera of multiple taxa, and a nearly perfect Jeholodens mammal.  The authors publish the raw CT dataset, so any reader with the software can check the scans.  The three-group breakdown of the Archaeoraptor slab (23 associated bone-bearing pieces, 26 arranged to portray an articulated rear half, and 39 shims) and the two quoted phrases about the second and third groups are the authors' own.  The fraud article uses it for that breakdown and for its Confuciusornis control. ↩

    1. 48a.

      On the control specimen, the Confuciusornis lacustris slab was.  “assembled from 81 separate pieces.”  Of these,  “22 associated bone-bearing pieces”.  carry most of the skeleton in correct natural association, with.  “An additional 55 extraneous shims”.  that carry no bone and have no verifiable relationship to the skeleton.  One honest note on the arithmetic: 22 and 55 sum to 77, not 81, and the passage as quoted does not say what the remaining four pieces are.  The 68% figure used in the fraud article is 55 of 81 and does not depend on that gap. ↩

  49. 49.

    Dempsey, Matthew et al.  “New perspectives on body size and shape evolution in dinosaurs.”  Biological Reviews 100(5).  2025.  A modelling study that estimates body mass for 52 non-avian dinosaurs from their skeletons, using soft-tissue scaling factors taken from CT scans of living birds and reptiles.  It is a methods paper about how body size and shape are estimated, not a polemic, and it infers that many earlier soft-tissue envelopes may be too small.  The fraud article cites it for the spread of body-mass estimates for Tyrannosaurus and for the authors' own statement that body volume estimates are often subjective.

    1. 49a.

      “Depending on the size and shape of the soft tissue envelope estimated by different researchers, body mass estimates based on volumetric models of adult Tyrannosaurus (~11–12 m in length) range from less than 6 tonnes to over 18 tonnes.” ↩

    2. 49b.

      The rank ordering of the 52 taxa by mass holds across methods, at a Spearman's rho above 0.99.  The fraud article prints this sentence so that the whole piece does not over-reach. ↩ ↩ ↩

  50. 50.

    Marjanović, David, and Michel Laurin.  “Phylogeny of Paleozoic limbed vertebrates reassessed through revision and expansion of the largest published relevant data matrix.”  PeerJ 6:e5565.  2019.  A 2019 PeerJ paper that audits the largest published phylogenetic data matrix for early limbed vertebrates, the 2007 matrix of Ruta and Coates.  It reports over 4,200 misscored cells in it, more than half of them typographic errors, and the authors revised the matrix and added 56 taxa to the original 102.  Marjanović examined the only known Casineria specimen in Edinburgh for a full day in order to score it.  The fraud article uses it to show that the 1999 claws and vertebrae were misdescribed, and that the specimen was an immature individual in Marjanović's reading.

    1. 50a.

      On the terminal phalanges:  “are neither pointed as expected of a claw, nor rounded as incorrectly shown in the interpretative drawing by Paton, Smithson & Clack (1999: fig. 3b).  Instead, their ends are squared off (Fig. 6).” ↩

  51. 51.

    Rawson, James R. G. Jr. et al.  “Brazilian fossils reveal homoplasy in the oldest mammalian jaw joint.”  Nature 634:381–388.  2024.  A 2024 Nature paper that used micro-CT scans of 25 specimens of three non-mammal cynodonts (Brasilodon, Riograndia and Oligokyphus) to study their jaw joints.  It found that Brasilodon lacks the incipient dentary condyle and squamosal glenoid that earlier descriptions gave it, and that the dentary–squamosal contact found in mammals evolved more than once.  The fraud article uses it for that correction and for why the earlier descriptions went wrong. ↩

  52. 52.

    Averianov, Alexander O., and Leonid L. Voyta.  “Putative Triassic stem mammal Tikitherium copei is a Neogene shrew.”  Journal of Mammalian Evolution 31:10.  2024.  A 2024 paper whose title states its verdict on the tooth named Tikitherium copei: that it is a Neogene shrew, not a Triassic stem mammal.  The fraud article uses it as the correction to the 2005 claim. ↩

  53. 53.

    Rupe, Christopher.  “"Lucy" and the Pygmy Human Hypothesis.”  Creation Research Society Quarterly 62:208–227.  2026.  Page 209:  “The allegations of fraud or a manipulated reconstruction do not stand up to scrutiny.”  A 2026 paper by Christopher Rupe, who holds a PhD in the earth sciences and is a young-earth creationist, arguing that A. afarensis, Lucy's species, should be reclassified.  It was accepted for publication on 20 November 2025.  The fraud article uses it because a creationist with a PhD rejects the fraud allegation, which makes his verdict harder to dismiss. ↩ ↩

  54. 54.

    Wise, Kurt P.  Faith, Form, and Time: What the Bible Teaches and Science Confirms about Creation and the Age of the Universe.  Broadman & Holman, Nashville.  2002.  A general statement of young-earth creation theory by a paleontologist trained at Harvard.  Its chapter on created kinds and its chapter on the Flood both argue that the rarity of transitional species, and the share of living species with fossils, fit a young earth better than an old one.

    1. 54a.

      Chapter 13:  “Also, if the fossil record is a documentation of hundreds of millions of years of time, then the approximately 250,000 fossil species documented to date would have to be an extremely low percentage of all the species that have ever lived. In contrast, the rapid deposition rate of the Flood would probably result in a very large percentage of fossil species being preserved. Our observation is that a very large percentage of modern species have a fossil record.” ↩

  55. 55.

    Oard, Michael J.  “The fossil record is complete enough.”  Journal of Creation 35(1):8–9.  Mar 2021.  A short perspective in Creation Ministries International's technical journal by a young-earth writer on Flood geology, arguing that the record is nearly complete and that its gaps are therefore real.  Its only mainstream source is Holland's 2017 presidential address.

    1. 55a.

      Section The fossil record is essentially complete:  “The fossil record is essentially complete”.  The section heading.  “Steven Holland points out that the fossil record is imperfect in a sense, but really nearly complete. It is imperfect in that it did not record every organism that has ever lived.” ↩

  56. 56.

    Holland, Steven M.  “Presidential Address: Structure, not Bias.”  Journal of Paleontology 91(6):1315–1317.  2017.  The 2017 presidential address to the Paleontological Society, by a stratigrapher at the University of Georgia.  It asks paleontologists to stop advertising the record's bias and to model its structure instead:  time-averaging, the architecture of sedimentary sequences, and which basins formed.  It is the only mainstream source in Oard's 2021 article, and it says the record is incomplete.

    1. 56a.

      Page 1315:  “As a record of everything that has ever lived on earth, the fossil record is an imperfect and incomplete data set. We know this. However, all data sets are incomplete.” ↩ ↩

  57. 57.

    Meyer, Stephen C.  Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design.  HarperOne, New York.  2013.  The leading intelligent-design book on the Cambrian explosion, by a philosopher of science at the Discovery Institute.  Its third chapter argues from Foote's sampling studies and from Benton, Wills and Hitchin that the gaps between Cambrian phyla are not sampling artefacts.  Mirror:  Archive.org

    1. 57a.

      Page 422, endnote 55 to chapter 3:  “Another statistical paleontologist, Michael J. Benton, and his colleagues have reached a similar conclusion. They note that “if scaled to the . . . taxonomic level of the family [and above], the past 540 million years of the fossil record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past””.  The original sentence, in Benton, Wills and Hitchin's abstract, reads "However, if scaled to the stratigraphic level of the stage and the taxonomic level of the family, the past 540 million years of the fossil record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past."  The words "and above" are not in it. ↩ ↩

  58. 58.

    Mángano, M. Gabriela, and Luis A. Buatois.  “Decoupling of body-plan diversification and ecological structuring during the Ediacaran–Cambrian transition: evolutionary and geobiological feedbacks.”  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281:20140038.  2014.  A research article that built a worldwide database of trace fossils, the burrows, tracks and trails animals leave in sediment, from 369 rock units across the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition.  Its Table 1 shows trace genera rising from 7 in the last Ediacaran interval to 42 in the Fortunian, the first Cambrian stage;  burrows need no hard parts to be preserved, so the rise is evidence about animals, not about shells.  Mirror:  PMC ↩ ↩

  59. 59.

    Benton, Michael J. et al.  “Quality of the fossil record through time.”  Nature 403:534–537.  2000.  Section Abstract:  “Assessments of congruence between stratigraphy and phylogeny for a sample of 1,000 published phylogenies show no evidence of diminution of quality backwards in time. Ancient rocks clearly preserve less information, on average, than more recent rocks. However, if scaled to the stratigraphic level of the stage and the taxonomic level of the family, the past 540 million years of the fossil record provide uniformly good documentation of the life of the past.”  A survey of 1,000 published family trees that compared the order of branching with the order of first fossil appearances and found no fall in agreement in older rocks.  It concedes that older rocks hold less information. ↩

  60. 60.

    Benton, Michael J., and R. Hitchin.  “Congruence between phylogenetic and stratigraphic data on the history of life.”  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 264(1383):885–890.  1997.  A survey of 384 published family trees of echinoderms, fishes and tetrapods, each scored for how well its branching order matches the order of first fossil appearances, on three measures.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 60a.

      Page 885, section Summary:  “the fossil record, incomplete as it is, gives a reasonably faithful documentation of the sequence of occurrence of organisms through time.” ↩

  61. 61.

    Oard, Michael J.  “How well do paleontologists know fossil distributions?”  CEN Technical Journal 14(1):7–8.  2000.  A short perspective by a young-earth writer arguing that fossil ranges keep expanding as more rock is examined, and that the geological column is therefore less certain than it appears.  It is, in effect, a creationist report of how incomplete known ranges are.

    1. 61a.

      Page 7:  “The more the sedimentary rocks of the earth are examined, the more the fossil ranges are expanded — especially downward.” ↩ ↩

  62. 62.

    Lazarus taxa: four examples.  n.d.  The Laotian rock rat, Laonastes aenigmamus, was described in 2005 and assigned to the extinct family Diatomyidae by Dawson, Marivaux, Li, Beard and Métais in Science 311 (2006): 1456–1458, doi 10.1126/science.1124187, after a temporal gap that the paper itself puts at.  “roughly 11 million years”.  Four groups that were found alive after the fossil record seemed to end.  The coelacanth Latimeria chalumnae was recovered in 1938 off East London, South Africa, and described by J. L. B. Smith in 1939, after a fossil record that ended in the Late Cretaceous.  Neopilina galatheae was dredged by the Galathea expedition in 1952 and described by Lemche in 1957, after a fossil record that ended in the Devonian.  The Wollemi pine, Wollemia nobilis, was found in 1994 in Wollemi National Park, New South Wales, with Wollemia-type pollen known through the Cenozoic.  The order article uses them to show that a Lazarus taxon extends a group's range upward and never places it below something it must postdate. ↩

  63. 63.

    Valentine, James W. et al.  “Assessing the fidelity of the fossil record by using marine bivalves.”  PNAS 103:6599–6604.  2006.  “For the marine Bivalvia … 308 of the 1,292 living genera and subgenera (herein termed 'taxa') are not recorded as fossils.  These missing taxa are not a random sample of the clade, but instead tend to have small body size, reactive shell structures, commensal or parasitic habit, deep-sea distribution, narrow geographic range, restriction to regions exposing few Neogene marine sediments, or recent date of formal taxonomic description.”  “Of the 106 extant bivalve families, 4 completely lack a fossil record, and these 4 each contain 3 or fewer taxa,”.  The global version of the 1989 Californian study, and the better citation for the global figure, according to the trends article.  Of the 1,292 living marine bivalve genera and subgenera, 308 are not recorded as fossils.  So 76% of living bivalve genera and subgenera are known as fossils globally.  The missing taxa tend to have small body size, reactive shell structures, a commensal or parasitic habit, deep-sea distribution, narrow ranges, a region that exposes few Neogene marine sediments, or a recent formal description.  At family rank, 4 of the 106 living bivalve families lack a fossil record, each with 3 or fewer taxa, and three of the four are restricted to the deep sea.  The paper's own table totals 26% missing against the 24% in the abstract, because one order is treated separately; the trends article cites 24%. ↩ ↩

  64. 64.

    Tyler, Carrie L., and Michał Kowalewski.  “The quality of the fossil record across higher taxa: compositional fidelity of phyla and classes in benthic marine associations.”  PeerJ 11:e15574.  2023.  Their conclusion, verbatim in part:  “dead molluscs appear to be an excellent proxy for all taxa when tracking spatio-temporal patterns and shifts in community structure”.  “the fossil record is likely to be reliable with respect to relative comparisons of composition and diversity.”  A field survey by two paleontologists who counted every macroscopic bottom-dwelling invertebrate, live and dead, at 52 dredge localities in Onslow Bay, off North Carolina, over four field seasons from 2011 to 2013.  It counted 8,798 living individuals and 54,116 dead ones, and 157 living species against 155 dead ones; molluscs are 35.0% of the living individuals and 98.2% of the dead, and arthropods are 33.5% and 0.11%.  The percentages are computed from the authors' table, not stated by the authors, and they put the distortion at a roughly 300-fold relative shift in one step; the survey covers one bay, so it shows the filter in one shallow-sea setting.  The trends article uses them to show how far the filter distorts a single sample. ↩

  65. 65.

    Hunt, Gene et al.  “Simple versus complex models of trait evolution and stasis as a response to environmental change.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(16):4885–4890.  2015.  A database of 709 sequences from nearly 200 fossil lineages, built by merging Hunt 2007 with Hopkins & Lidgard 2012 and adding new studies, with sequences running from 7 to 114 samples (median 14), each fitted with nine models instead of the three used in 2007.  The sequences are 249 planktic microfossils (median 22 samples), 257 invertebrate macrofossils (median 14), 112 vertebrates (median 8) and 91 benthic microfossils (median 14); microfossils are 340 of the 709, or 48%, down from 55% in 2007 but still nearly half, so the canonical modern test of stasis against gradualism is run about half on plankton and shelled protists, on both databases.  The authors find stasis common and directional change in about 13% of sequences, and the trends article uses the paper because its authors reject the 2007 finding that plankton change directionally more often than other fossils.

    1. 65a.

      Pages 4886–4887:  “Previous indications that directional trends are more likely to be observed in planktonic microfossils than in other fossil groups (14, 29, 30) are not supported by logistic regression (SI Appendix, Table S3).”  Reference 14 in that sentence is Hunt 2007, the paper whose plankton result the sentence rejects.  References 29 and 30 are Jackson & Cheetham 1999 and McKinney 1985, the same two sources that Hunt 2007 cited for the "geological and biological grounds" for expecting plankton to change gradually. ↩

  66. 66.

    Clarey, Timothy L., and Davis J. Werner.  “A Progressive Global Flood Model Confirmed by Rock Data Across Five Continents.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism 9:412–445.  2023.  The flagship paper of the megasequence programme.  It maps nearly 3,000 stratigraphic columns from five continents onto Sloss's six megasequences.  The order article uses it as the only young-earth account of fossil order that rests on a continent-scale stratigraphic database. ↩

  67. 67.

    The Clarey megasequence corpus.  n.d.  No supplementary data file, no repository and no DOI'd dataset accompanies any paper in the corpus.  Neither the 2018 nor the 2023 ICC paper includes a data appendix.  The published empirical content is six isopach maps and one summary table.  The columns were modelled in RockWorks, a commercial package.  Page 414:  In the 2023 paper Clarey states that the machine-generated isopach maps were.  “trimmed”.  to match the extent of each megasequence shown by the basal lithology maps, a judgement call applied to each of the twelve maps that produce Table 1, and undocumented.  This is the single largest methodological objection to the programme, and it is what any journal referee would say.  Note also Clarey's own 2015 Acts & Facts concession that careful comparison of rock types against sequence boundaries shows very few.  “ideal”.  uniformitarian megasequences, which undercuts the tidy sandstone-shale-carbonate story told elsewhere in the same corpus.  The data behind the megasequence papers, and how their maps were made: six isopach maps and one summary table, modelled in RockWorks, a commercial package.  The order article calls the undocumented trimming of those maps the single largest methodological objection to the programme, the objection any journal referee would raise. ↩ ↩

  68. 68.

    Foote, Michael.  “On the probability of ancestors in the fossil record.”  Paleobiology 22(2):141–151.  1996.  A modelling study of how often an ancestor and its descendant should both turn up as fossils, under three models of how species arise and a range of preservation rates.  It finds the chance not negligible, and notes that fast transitions would make major ones much harder to catch.

    1. 68a.

      Page 148:  “If speciation is rapid relative to the duration of species (Gould and Eldredge 1993), then the chance of capturing transitions, especially major transitions among classes and orders, is substantially diminished.”  “This would have important implications for whether the small number of documented major transitions provides strong evidence against evolution”. ↩ ↩

  69. 69.

    Hughes, Martin et al.  “Clades reach highest morphological disparity early in their evolution.”  PNAS 110(34):13875–13879.  2013.  Page 13875:  The paper gives the field's central distinction in these words:  “Disparity is conceptually and empirically distinct from diversity.  For example, a relatively small sample of species that differ greatly from one another morphologically (e.g., one species from each order of insects) is likely to be more disparate than a much larger sample of species that are morphologically more homogeneous (e.g., a thousand beetles).”  A meta-analysis of 98 metazoan clades, vertebrate and invertebrate, radiating throughout the Phanerozoic, the span of time with abundant animal fossils.  Each clade's disparity (the spread of body forms) was measured as the sum of variances on successive principal-coordinate axes, all analysed with discrete character matrices for comparability.  Each trajectory was summarised by its scaled centre of gravity, where values below 0.5 mean bottom-heavy, which the paper calls relatively early high disparity.  A supplementary analysis adds 53 living clades.  The trends article uses it as the largest test of the early-high-disparity claim, and its headline number is a null.

    1. 69a.

      “Early high patterns inevitably imply an unsampled period of cladogenesis (or the existence of ghost ranges) at the base of the clade, but this either occurs too fast for the available stratigraphic resolution or is not fossilized (11, 50).”  They also note that their own null is conservative against their finding: because clades begin from a single species and extinction is random with respect to the tree, a homogeneous birth–death model with Brownian character evolution predicts top-heaviness, so.  “Our use of 0.5 as a null is slightly simplistic, therefore, but biased against our principal finding”.  “Our results do not allow us to distinguish between ecological and developmental explanations for this phenomenon.” ↩

  70. 70.

    O'Rourke, J. E.  “Pragmatism versus materialism in stratigraphy.”  American Journal of Science 276:47–55.  Jan 1976.  A journal article on method in stratigraphy, the science of ordering and correlating rock layers.  It tests the terms stratigraphers borrow from mechanics against the question of how each concept is verified in the field, and finds that many hide assumptions that look like circular reasoning, such as the claim that the radiometric scale had to be calibrated against the geologic column.  It argues that stratigraphy should first present its case as a cognitive process from experience, comparing rock features as above or below one another in maps and sections, and only then as a historical process from inference.  The order article uses it because creationists quote it most often for a line about circular reasoning, and O'Rourke's own argument answers that charge.

    1. 70a.

      Page 52:  “the geologic column, which, as a matter of fact, was put together before evolution was known.” ↩

    2. 70b.

      Page 52:  O'Rourke's account of what a stratigrapher actually does: the reliability of an index fossil is estimated by how many times it has been found above one taxon and below another in vertical sections, and on the thousand-and-first occasion the expert arranges the specimens in the customary order.  That is induction from a thousand superposition observations (a lower layer is older than the one above it), not circularity. ↩