Transcendental Taphonomy: The Material Conditions of Paleobiological Evidence

Taphonomy is usually treated as a correction to paleobiological inference: the study of how organisms and traces become fossils. We argue for a stronger thesis. Fossils are not transparent samples of past life but archive-mediated projections, and taphonomic regimes help determine which extinct organisms, behaviors, communities and absences can become evidentially available and through which preservational pathways. We call this view transcendental taphonomy, in a weak and material sense. The central analytic tool is the legibility horizon, the point at which a lineage, trait, behavior or ecology first becomes archive-visible. A second tool, archive equivalence, identifies cases where biologically different hidden histories would yield the same relevant fossil archive. Applied to the Ediacaran–Cambrian transition, the framework treats the Cambrian explosion neither as a mere artifact nor as simple punctual origin, but as a hybrid biological-archival event: animal ecologies, skeletonization, sediment disruption and preservation regimes changed together. The result is a diagnostic framework that asks whether origin, absence, dominance, replacement or novelty claims are merely compatible with an archive, accessible through a preservational pathway, discriminable from rivals, independently constrained, or robust across archives. Three consequences follow: biological fitness and taphonomic fitness must be distinguished; there is no task-blind corrected fossil record independent of explanatory target; and the conditions of paleobiological possibility fracture across local preservation regimes. Together, these consequences support a materially mediated realism about deep time: fossils disclose the past, but only through plural, path-dependent regimes of fossil legibility.