How many fossils have been discovered?

[Rahul]

Lol @ crocoduck. So I understand that all fossils are transitional but I've generally gathered from reading Dawkins and Coyne that evolution occurs gradually, hencing blurring the any long term differences with transitions that would look nearly identical from generation to generation. This seems pretty apparent among hominid fossils but how come there aren't more fossils that look more obvious to be "common ancestors"? Or are there and I'm just misinformed?

The problem with transitional fossils is that species can stick around pretty much without any obvious change, especially in fossilized form, for millions of years. But when their environments change you have a sudden burst of transition while that species adapts to the new conditions.

This can happen extremely rapidly.

This is something that a lot of people don't seem to understand. Yes, technically any fossilized species that isn't the last of the line of their branch of evolution is a transitional species.

But there are stable species and there are transitional species.

Let's put it this way. Let's say you have a shrew like species. It stays stable for 5 million years because it's environment is stable. Any fossils of these guys are technically transitional because they eventually evolved into another species. BUT they were a stable species for a really long time.

Then something happens to change their environment and over say 50-100 thousand years they undergo rapid evolution and turn into what humans would consider a different species. Then, since they are adapted well enough to the new variables of their changed environment they stabilize again for another 5 million years.

So 5 million years stable, 100,000 years of rapid evolution, then another 5 million years stable.

Technically they're all "transitional species" but the really interesting ones were those undergoing rapid evolution during the 100,000 years.

Like this guy:

"Most fossil giraffes have short necks and today's have long necks, but anatomist Nikos Solounias of the New York Institute of Technology's New York College of Osteopathic Medicine is preparing a description of a giraffe fossil, Bohlinia, with a neck that is intermediate in length. - See more at: http://www.livescience.com/3306-fossils-...ME4Dh.dpuf"

So the problem is you have in this example 10,100,000 years of potential fossils, but only a narrow window of 100,000 years of potential fossils they really smack you in the face with the facts of evolution.