fossil records are very hard to find, let alone that it’s very rare for animals to be fossilized in the first place, however, as time passed, more and more transitional fossils are being found and it always fits into the tree of life which evolution model predicts.
you can find very good set of transitional fossils about whale evolution, fish to amphibian evolution, etc.

and of course, fossil evidence is only a part of evidences that supports the theory of evolution, dna sequencing evidence and comparative anatomy are also very strong evidence for evolution.

as you know, punctuated equillibrium(아마도 진화는 갑자기 일어났다) is one of different opinions about HOW the evolution happened, which is not accepted as consensus yet. it’s still in debate.

Evolution cannot be an answer without a proper explanation of its ancestor’s extinction.
Otherwise we should be living with the variety of the pre-evolution animals.
Other than the global climate change, such thing is hard to happen, and we only have a few recorded global catastrophes.

sk/
competition is the base of the theory of evolution.
living beings are struggling to survive with “limited” resource all the time. it is simply that extincted animals were not as good as survived ones.
and remember, we are living with shark right now, which was not much evolved for millions of years.

that’s what I call ‘simple-minded’ point-of-view.

natural selection does not scale. competition and survival is happens locally, not globally. should extinction to occur, it requires a global catastrophe to initiate natural selection process.

“mass” extinction requires drastic change in environment(such as meteor shower, ice age, etc) but why regular gradual extinction needs such catastrophe?

the fact that evolution happens locally means that it works in the environment of limited resource, that is, more competetion among individuals and competition drives extinction, what’s wrong with it? maybe i don’t understand fully what you’re claiming. could you explain a little further? (by the way, i can read korean, just can’t type here at work)

I don’t think there such thing as ‘regular gradual extinction’. It may happen in a confined area, but on the Earth, they can always ‘migrate’ and ‘re-populate’. Four seasons is a kind of recurring global catastrphe in a sence that plants die during the cold period. Birds migrate. Animals find shelter. It should’ve been the same when dinosaur extincted since earth should have been tilted from the beginning.

Those fossilized species were once so abundant and lasted hundreds of thousands of years. they had reached their equilibrium. they had the population balance. it was perfect for them to be so florish like human do today. They only thing that could change and extinct them is by something global and massive change in its environment.

So, most of the fossilized species that failed should be linked with some catastrophe, and there is lack of evidance that links them.
Natural selection shows a snapshot of what happens in terms of population change, but I think it is insufficient to explain along with the history of the Earth.

yes, some do migrate and re-populate but some species can’t and go extinct.
isn’t it also possible that stabilized species go extinct because of newly emerged species by losing out the competetion? just like humans make many species go extinct nowadays. and even without human influence, there are many species going extinct everyday.

i think you’re the one with narrow sighted view on evolutionary history.
population balance of human(and all the other animals today) flourishing earth is just a blink in evolutionary time.