Argument from silence (argumentum ex silentio)

Biological Parallel

The fossil record's silence on Cambrian ancestors suggested complex life appeared spontaneously 540 million years ago—until soft-bodied Ediacaran fauna were discovered in rare preservation sites. Absence of fossils reflected preservation bias, not absence of organisms. Paleontology confronts this fallacy constantly: absence of evidence is evidence of absence only when we've looked in the right places, with the right methods, at the right scales. The coelacanth was 'extinct' for 66 million years until caught off South Africa in 1938. Sampling failure masquerades as knowledge.