No fossil is buried with its birth certificate. That, and the scarcity of fossils, means that it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way.. To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story–amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific. Henry Gee
About This Quote

A fossil is not an individual, nor is it a representative of an individual. A fossil is not there to tell us who it was that lived and died at that particular spot. The interest in fossils is the interest in the fossils themselves.

Source: In Search Of Deep Time

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