Lazarus taxa

From EvoWiki

A Lazarus taxon, named after the man whom the Bible said was raised from the dead by Jesus Christ, is a taxon for which specimens are separated by large amounts of geological time with no intervening fossil record, making it appear as if they "rose from the dead."

A recent popular example are the Coelacanths, whose fossil record extends from the Devonian until toward the end of Mesozoic where it abruptly ends. In 1938, Marjorie Courtenay Latimer, the curator of an East London museum, found a specimen in a local fisherman's catch.

Lazarus taxa are sometimers claimed as evidence against evolution by creationists. Instead, they are evidence against a simplistic reading of the fossil record. Environments do not fossilize equally and thus large parts of earth's history are lost to us entirely. For example, the Coelacanth is a lobe-finned fish adapted to the deep sea. Deep sea species may fossilize, but are rarely brought to the surface where fossil hunters collect. As a result, the lobe-finned fish vanish from the fossil record when the surface living species went extinct, while the deep sea species continued on without leaving a record.

When species that have evolved in an environment not prone to fossilization later move back into a fossil prone environment, it can result in sudden appearance in the fossil record.