>>120615459It's actually super hard to determine species on a lot of fossils because they are often incomplete or damaged.
Also the bones alone can often obscure subtle differences between closely related species.
Recently there was a big change in the canid phylogeny because they had actually found a DNA sample which placed the dire wolf on a much different branch than previously thought.
As such it is likely that there are far more species among the discovered fossils than we believe, but their bones and partial skeletons obscure that they looked a bit more different when alive than we assume based on what we know.
Then there is the law of averages. The more animals of a species lived over a long time the more we will find of them. Species that were not very successful are unlikely to be preserved at any point.
Plus the fields where fossils are found are few and far in between because they are places that had ideal conditions for fossilization to occur AND where they were not destroyed later when, say, glaciers ground deep layers of sediment into fine dust, or they sank beneath the sea, or dropped so deep into the Earth's crust that we will never find them.
As such the big fossil fields are bound to give us TONS of whatever animals lived there in big numbers during the time when the fossilization events occurred.
Rare animals, animals that lived elsewhere or earlier/later will not be preserved or be very rare in fossils.
We also have pretty detailed records of a load of species for the tiny keyhole into the past that we are looking through.
Just saying "we only identified 250k species" is pretty ridiculous. That is a vast amount of beasts to just dismiss. And far more than the living mammalian species.
If all your side can do is point at the ambitious project of trying to reconstruct the history of the planet's living organisms across deep time and say that the current level of grossly misrepresented science is not good enough, therefore my god; you lost.
