Editing Taphonomy (section)

===Human biases===
Much of the incompleteness of the fossil record is due to the fact that only a small amount of rock is ever exposed at the surface of the Earth, and not even most of that has been explored. Our fossil record relies on the small amount of exploration that has been done on this. Unfortunately, paleontologists as humans can be very biased in their methods of collection; a bias that must be identified. Potential sources of bias include,
*'''Search images''': field experiments have shown that paleontologists working on, say fossil clams are better at collecting clams than anything else because their search image has been shaped to bias them in favour of clams.
*'''Relative ease of extraction''': fossils that are easy to obtain (such as many phosphatic fossils that are easily extracted ''en masse'' by dissolution in acid) are overabundant in the fossil record.
*'''Taxonomic bias''': fossils with easily discernible morphologies will be easy to distinguish as separate species, and will thus have an inflated abundance.{{citation needed|date=April 2021}}