What are the advantages and disadvantages of fossil record in studying evolution?

Answer 1

The fossil record is skewed in favour of marine or freshwater organisms because those are the most likely environments to preserve signs of lifeforms.

Even animals living on land are mostly found as fossils in water-lain sediments after they were swept into water. That is why fossils of humans are very rare, if we lived in the sea there would be many more to find.

Also, the chances of any animal or plant being fossilised is very, very rare, even in the sea.

Answer 2

Basicly, I was told that the limitation is that it's not complete as you need perfect conditions (i.e. time, Heat + needs to be under sedement), otherwise you don't produce a fossile.

Answer 3

Fossils are one of the best evidence of evolution, mainly because they are the remains of living organisms from the past, which allow us to compare them with living organisms. However, the fossil record is notoriously incomplete and it is also biased in favor of animals with hard body parts, such as skeletons and shells. Soft bodied organisms and soft body parts are rarely preserved and there are often huge gaps in some evolutionary sequences. For example, Archaeopteryx is the earliest known bird, but it is already a bird, nothwithstanding some of the features that are unquestionably reptilian. The earliest known reptile with feathers is Longisquama, but there is a gap of some 75 million years between Longisquama and Archaeopteryx, and nothing has yet been found that are intermediate between these two important fossils.

Finally, DNA is virtually unobtainable from fossils, making it nearly impossible to compare the DNA of most fossils with living organisms. In terms of phylogenetic tree construction, DNA data is far superior to fossil evidence. However, if not for the existence of fossils, DNA data alone would be unconvincing as evidence of evolutionary change.

Answer 4

Habitat Bias, Taxonomic Bias, Temporal Bias, and Abundance Bias

Answer 5

because because

Answer 6

DNA is unattainable

Answer 7

true