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Too late, I studied Finance and National Economics and work in Logistics. Space and evolution are my biggest interests outside of that, though
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Paleontology only scratches the most superficial part of the surface, since the vast majority of organisms die without getting fossilized.
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It might be “an awful lot” in absolute terms, but certainly not in relative terms.
Take for example just the dinosaurs. They lived in a relatively short time span from -245mio years until -66mio years. A total time span of 179mio years.
Google tells me that between 300 and 1000 species of dinosaurs have been identified (the estimate is that broad because it’s not certain that each identified species is really an unique species).
That means, there’s about 1.6-5.5 species of dinosaur per million years that we know of. Or to put it differently, there’s on average 181k - 650k years between each dinosaur species we identified.
Homo sapiens have existed for 200k-300k years. All domesticated animals exist for less than that.
Within that time span tens of thousands of species have come into existance and died out again.
That’s about the order of magnitude of what we don’t know and probably can’t ever know.
And remember, these numbers are only for the relatively recent era of the dinosaurs. It’s much, much worse for times that are longer ago.
Also, even of the species that live right now, estimates say that we only know about 14% of all species.
“An awful lot” in this context is still relatively little, hence the very apt usage of the phrase “scratching the surface”.
Imagine being the first crab
New shell who dis?
I feel like seeing life before it had been through so many evolutionary shocks would have been neat
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The ones after the next extinction event will be even better!
