Then it goes to a museum where others can examine it and challenge her interpretation if they have better evidence. Fossil material, on the other hand, carries the dimension of time, and often shows sequences of species that are obviously related to one another, that follow one another in time, and are generally interpreted as evolutionary lineages. In such cases, we might expect to see transitional populations quite regularly. We rarely see truly transitional populations in the fossil record. This could be for one of several reasons.
Evolutionary transitions take place as a species adapts toward a new equilibrium.
There is nothing necessarily abrupt or unusual about the transition. But the fossil record is so incomplete that we miss the transitions. Evolutionary transitions from one species to another take place on a shorter time scale than the average life of the species involved, during which time the morphology of the species stays rather stable. Even though the fossil record may be reasonably complete, we are still much less likely to sample a speciation event than a species in a period of stability. Evolutionary transitions between species might be radically abrupt, taking place very quickly in very small, isolated, peripheral populations.