Of a certainty, discontinuities play a big role in the study of fossils. After all, why go to the bother of tediously digging out the midden of a remote cave, with its layers and layers of disgusting filth, when you can simply put on your hiking boots and go for a pleasant stroll through the broken lands of Colorado, ostensibly looking for bits and pieces of dinosaur skeletons.
Those discontinuities formed by earthquake and subsidence, even by our own activities, as we dynamite our way through the folded mountains of the unmade bedcovers of a sleeping giant, are much easier to examine.
And what is the K-T boundary, with its planet-girdling sprinkling of Iridium, but a discontinuity?
It is a most tedious "undertaking", to sort out all the convolutions of a writhing, living planet, as its very continents go on walk-about, colliding with each other from time to time like the lumbering blind amoeboid creatures they are, but hey, what else is all that high-falutin book learning good for?
Bob- We’re talkign discontinuity of hte fossils- and quite frankly, they DO do the tedious work of ‘diggign htrough the icky stuff’- not sure where your insult stems from, but certainly not fro mthe facts.