Why have no new major groups of living things appeared in the fossil record in a long time?
This peculiar question requires students to determine what is meant by a “major group” and also what is meant by “a long time”. Neither term, of course, has any scientific meaning. One might regard 100 years as a long time, and it is indeed true that no new phyla have originated in the last 100 years. However, by standards of geologic time, one of the most important “major groups of living things” did indeed originate recently. Flowering plants (the Anthophyta) appeared for the first time in the Cretaceous, roughly 125 million years ago. Flowering plants appeared only in the last 3% of the 4.5 billion years of the planet’s geologic history, which certainly qualifies as recent. Therefore, this question, which overlooks the recent evolutionary appearance of flowering plants, makes blatantly wrong presuppositions. Why do major groups of plants and animals have no transitional forms in the fossil record? This question also makes blatantly wrong presuppositions. The fossil record is, in fac
