One of the problems with the “fossil record” is the assumption of what it actually is.
If you assume that it corresponds to long periods of time, you’ll interpret it one way,
and if you assume “billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the earth” by a catastropic event, over a period of just a few years,
you’ll interpret it another way.
Darwin’s theory summed up.... some birds evolved longer beaks than other based on environmental factors and geography, this caused mutation on its own. So then lets postulate that there is no God, it was all random chance based on mutations driven by no specific reason or causality. That we must suspend some Laws of Physics to accommodate this Philosophy which was first proposed by a man who early in his career still believed in bloodletting as real medicine. That an astronomical series of events happened, that algae evolved into the Ameoba, the Amoeba evolved into some for of sponge, the sponge avolved into palnkton, plankton to trilobyte, trilobyte to fish, fish to salamander, salamander to lizard, lizard to bird or mammal, to monkey, than ape, than primitive man then us...Here is an illustration of how improbable we evolved from Algae....1 in 153 quadrillion based on the human genome. Now that is something I could get behind../snark. Or you can believe the truth, which was an intelligent creator STARTED the universe and designed it all and us in his own image. Which is a 1 to 1 probability and is consistent with logic and reason.
Evolutionist are a sick deluded bunch and dangerous. I don't want anyone divorced this much from reason and logic doing any teaching or leading. We are seeing the fruits of this now in a avowed evolutionist President.