The Earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood - wire of information

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
indication of transition forms, much like the mythical birth
of Venus. The paleontologist suddenly comes upon a species,
or a whole group of them, which have not been found before.
They are all fully evolved; they obviously have had
long histories; there must have been hundreds or even thousands
of ancestral forms for them; but absolutely no trace of
the preceding forms can be found. It happened this way with
the dinosaurs, which appeared in Africa, with a great many
species already fully developed, at the beginning of the
Mesozoic Era. They seem to have come, literally, out of nothing.
Sometimes ancestral forms of a particular plant or animal
will be found at a great distanceon another continent,
perhaps but always there appear to have existed many intermediary
links, which have been lost. Even in the case of the
horse, where an unusually good record exists, there are many
missing links.
A part of the reason for this situation is, of course, the
imperfect preservation of the fossil record. There appear to
be several reasons for this. Fossilization itself is a very rare
event; very few individuals of any species are preserved, and
the great majority of all the species that have existed have
disappeared without a trace. Then, of the fossils that were
preserved in the rocks since the beginning of the sedimentary
record, about 95 per cent have been destroyed, since about
that percentage of all the sedimentary rocks of the older
periods has been eroded away and redeposited, with consequent
destruction of all fossils. Finally, of the fossils that
have been preserved, it is very unlikely that paleontologists
can have seen and studied more than a very insignificant pro-
portionlet us say, to put the matter as liberally as possible,
that they may have seen one millionth of the existing fossils.
Many of the latter, of course, are buried deep in the earth
or under the numerous shallow seas, and will never be seen.
But true as this is, it does not quite satisfy. Relatively few
and scattered as fossils may be, it is still to be wondered at
that we do not have a respectable handful of reasonably com-
plete life histories. The light cast on this matter by the theory