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Missing Links in the History of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Charles R. Marshall
Charles R. Marshall*
Affiliation:
Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 20 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 USA
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Extract

Ever since Darwin proposed his theory of evolution (or more correctly, theories; see Mayr, 1991) it has been assumed that intermediates now extinct once existed between living species. For some, the hunt for these so-called missing links in the fossil record became an obsession, a search for evidence thought needed to establish the veracity of evolutionary theory. Few modern paleontologists, however, search explicitly for ancestors in the fossil record because we now know that fossils can be used to chart the order of evolution regardless of whether they are directly ancestral either to extinct organisms or to those living today.

Type
Section 2: Organizing the Data
Information
The Paleontological Society Special Publications , Volume 11: Evolution: Investigating the Evidence, 2nd ed. , 2002 , pp. 97 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © 1999, 2002 by The Paleontological Society 

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