How many fossils have been discovered?

[pineapplebunnybounce]

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?

There are a lot of common ancestors, it depends on how far back you're willing to go. Like you said, a lot of hominid fossils look alike, so we sort of know they belong to the same clade. But birds and crocodile share common ancestors that probably was a dinosaur. When you go really far back, the common ancestors don't look like modern animals anymore, because they've had time to gather more differences after diverging.