Beneath the seafloor, time itself becomes tangled — shells from creatures separated by millennia lie side by side, confounding those who seek to read the past. An international team of scientists, drawing on two decades of work and more than 7,500 fossils gathered from oceans across the globe, has now identified the principal force behind this temporal confusion: not the burrowing of creatures, nor the fragility of shells, but the simple, steady rate at which sediment accumulates. The finding, born of an unlikely convergence of eight nations' research, offers paleontologists a clearer lens thr