How many species of mammals has been discovered till now?

If you were hired by Time Magazine to produce a drawing of what a newly discovered species might have looked?

• like, of what a newly discovered species might have looked like, what features would you be confident in reproducing and what features would be speculation? Does our inability to know everything from the fossil record limit our ability to understand previous species? Does it limit our understanding of evolution?

• Answer:

  That would depend entirely on how much they have found of that species. A few bones, a whole skeleton, several complete skeletons, fossil imprints and so on. The less facts there are the more uncertain the image will be. So: ["What features would you be confident in reproducing and what features would be speculation?"] I would feel confident in reproducing anything that there is enough scientific evidence of. Anything that isn't based on the science would then be speculation and I would make it clear that it was speculation and nothing else. ["Does our inability to know everything from the fossil record limit our ability to understand previous species?"] Of course. It's uncertain even if we add all other knowledge that we have of the time and environment they lived in. We can at best claim to have a basic understanding and never full knowledge. ["Does it limit our understanding of evolution?"] This question is a bit sketchy. Do we understand what evolution is? Of course we do if the take the time to learn about the concept. It's nothing strange about it and can easily be explained as well as proven. Evolution is in a very basic form "progress, change and growth over time". Our limited understanding of fossils or newly found species does not change that basic fact. Does it limit our understanding of what exactly has happened through the millions of years of evolution this world has gone through? Of course it does. We can only make theories about the nature of the exact events based on what we know. There are huge gaps of information missing, things we have not found yet and things that we might never find. This is also one of the corner stones of science, we base our theories on what facts we have and admit that we don't know it all. When new facts surface we have to revise the theory and start all over again. That's how science works. "Question, find facts, form a theory, question, find new facts, revise theory ... start all over again." Your work does not end because you think you know the truth.