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Identify limitations of studying the fossil record.
Organisms are only rarely preserved as fossils in the best of circumstances, and only a fraction of such fossils have been discovered.Because of the specialized and rare circumstances required for a biological structure to fossilize, only a small percentage of life-forms can be expected to be represented in discoveries, and each discovery represents only a snapshot of the process of evolution. The transition itself can only be illustrated and corroborated by transitional fossils, which will never demonstrate an exact half-way point.