Apparently, it's not obvious from the fossil record how to decide between the simplest of concepts, such as gradualism versus catastrophism. In your opinion, is it even possible to reasonably estimate the percentage of creatures that became fossils through an ordinary gradualistic process as opposed to catastrophes, such as megafloods, which could bury creatures in oxygen deprived silt thereby enabling the process of fossilization? Is the controversy resolvable? What, if anything, can be inferred from the fossil record to weigh the relative contributions of catastrophes versus gradualistic processes in the creation of all known fossils?
I work in paleontology. It's a good question but you have to define what you mean by 'percentage of creatures'...are you referring to individual organisms...or to species...or genera, etc.? It's difficult to compare the build up of miles of sedimentary limestone over hundreds of millions of years involving millions of species (such as the rocks of the Canadian Rockies) with something like the sudden event that created the fossils of the Burgess Shale in 'one lens in a narrow exposure on one mountain in those same Rocky Mountains. Remember that a 'megaflood' is an event that impacts a fraction of what we know of fossil life. It is a terrestrial phenomenon and the vast, vast majority of the fossil record is marine.....also that among marine fossils that 99.99% are microfossils such as foramnifera, conodonts, etc. that are studied using microscopes. I work primarily with marine fossils so i would say 'gradual'....but I also dabble with terrestrial vertebrate fossils in our badlands here in Alberta and there I would say that floods, mudslides, volcanoes etc. would have had more impact on preserving larger vertebrate organisms....but a good chunk of terrestrial fossils (such as pollen and mollusca) are a result of gradual processes.
