The "fossil record" is yet another missing link in the foundation of the unobserved faith of evolution.

Drs. Tony Arnold (Ph.D., Harvard) and Bill Parker (Ph.D., Chicago) are the developers of what reportedly is the largest, most complete set of data ever compiled on the evolutionary history of an organism. The two scientists have painstakingly pieced together a virtually unbroken fossil record that shows in stunning detail how a single-celled marine organism has evolved during the past 66 million years. Apparently, it's the only fossil record known to science that has no obvious gaps -- no "missing links."

"It's all here -- a complete record," says Arnold. "There are other good examples, but this is by far the best. We're seeing the whole picture of how this organism has changed throughout most of its existence on Earth."
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As he spoke, Arnold showed a series of photographs, taken through a microscope, depicting the evolutionary change wrought on a single foraminiferan species.

"This is the same organism, as it existed through 500,000 years," Arnold said. "We've got hundreds of examples like this, complete life and evolutionary histories for dozens of species."

"The forams may not be representative of all organisms, but at least in this group we can actually see evolution happening. We can see transitions from one species to another," Parker said.

"And that's a very rare observation." Had Darwin been able to examine the fossil record of forams, he could have fortified many of his arguments on how new species come into being.

The famous naturalist always held that new plants and animals arise from unstable varieties sprung off from old species. Competition among varieties, pressured by the law of "survival of the fittest," inevitably leads to populations that are so profoundly different that they become sexually incompatible (incapable of producing offspring) with populations other than themselves. And voila, a new species is born.

The pattern is exactly what Arnold and Parker have found in the forams. It is but one of a number of observations that the FSU team has made thus far about what arguably is nature's crowning achievement -- the act of speciation itself.

"We've literally seen hundreds of speciation events," Arnold added. "This allows us to check for patterns, to determine what exactly is going on. We can quickly tell whether something is a recurring phenomenon -- a pattern -- or whether it's just an anomaly.
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Adherents of Darwin's theory of gradualism, in which new species slowly branch off from original stock, should be delighted by what the FSU researchers have found. The foram record clearly reveals a robust, highly branched evolutionary tree, complete with Darwin's predicted "dead ends" -- varieties that lead nowhere -- and a profusion of variability in sizes and body shapes. Moreover, transitional forms between species are readily apparent, making it relatively easy to track ancestor species to their descendants.