Rotting fish and taphonomy: what fossilizes?
A common bleat from creationists is “Where are the millions of transitional fossils Darwin said there should be?” Martin Brazeau has an excellent post on taphonomy at The Lancelet reporting a paper in which folks let poor innocent critters rot in order to ascertain which anatomical features are likely to be preserved and which are likely to be lost before fossilization, and the implications for interpreting fossils of ‘soft’ tissues for phylogenetics. Comment there, please.