> According to the book, the fossil record is not a bad representation
> of past life forms. "...for example, in groups that leave easily
> fossilised remains, such as mammals and molluscs, more than 60% of
> species, 80% of genera and 90% of families have been discovered....
I wonder how these stats were developed. My own view (that the early
Cambrian was a time of wild experimentation in metazoan forms) would
suggest that an imponderable number of family-level experiments in
morphology were short-lived.
-- Cliff Lundberg ~ San Francisco ~ cliff@noevalley.com