"It seemed obvious to [Darwin] that, if his theory of evolution [were] correct, fossils ought to provide incontrovertible proof of it, since each stratum should contain links between the species of earlier and later strata, and if sufficient fossils were collected, it would be possible to arrange them in ancestor descendent sequences and so build up a precise picture of the course of evolution. This was not so in Darwin’s time, and today, after more than another hundred years of assiduous fossil collecting, the picture still has extensive gaps."
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Evolution, Chapter 11-2, p. 128
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Colin Patterson
Colin Patterson FRS (1933–1998), was a British palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London from 1962 to his official retirement in 1993 who specialised in fossil fish and systematics, advocating the transformed cladistics school.
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