Stephen Jay Gould on the fossil record:
Step way way back, blur the details, and you may want to read this sequence as a tale of predictable progress: prokaryotes first, then eukaryotes, then multicellular life. But scrutinize the particulars and the comforting story collapses. Why did life remain at stage 1 for two-thirds of its history if complexity offers such benefits? Why did the origin of multicellular life proceed as a short pulse through three radically different faunas, rather than as a slow and continuous rise of complexity? The history of life is endlessly fascinating, endlessly curious, but scarcely the stuff of our usual thoughts and hopes. Wonderful Life, p. 60.
[...] seems to prefer the “step way way back, blur the details” version of the fossil record. Thank goodness we have top paleontologists like Stephen Jay [...]