“An awful lot” in this context is still relatively little, hence the very apt usage of the phrase “scratching the surface”.
Comment on The various species before the first couple extinction events must have been fascinating
floo@retrolemmy.com 2 days agoYour statement struck me as strange and somewhat ironic because paleontology involves a lot of digging deep to find fossils. And while I obviously can’t disagree with you on the fact that a lot of organisms did die without getting fossilized, I disagree that paleontology is just “scratching the surface“. Certainly, not everything can be revealed via paleontology for the obvious reasons, but it has revealed an awful lot.
AlexanderTheDead@lemmy.world 2 days ago
squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 days ago
It might be “an awful lot” in absolute terms, but certainly not in relative terms.
Take for example just the dinosaurs. They lived in a relatively short time span from -245mio years until -66mio years. A total time span of 179mio years.
Google tells me that between 300 and 1000 species of dinosaurs have been identified (the estimate is that broad because it’s not certain that each identified species is really an unique species).
That means, there’s about 1.6-5.5 species of dinosaur per million years that we know of. Or to put it differently, there’s on average 181k - 650k years between each dinosaur species we identified.
Homo sapiens have existed for 200k-300k years. All domesticated animals exist for less than that.
Within that time span tens of thousands of species have come into existance and died out again.
That’s about the order of magnitude of what we don’t know and probably can’t ever know.
And remember, these numbers are only for the relatively recent era of the dinosaurs. It’s much, much worse for times that are longer ago.
Also, even of the species that live right now, estimates say that we only know about 14% of all species.