At this point, paleontologists have found few well-documented cases that match the original model of punctuated equilibra, with rapid change happening only during speciation. But Eldredge and Gould’s ideas have led to some signifi- cant changes in how paleontologists look at the fossil record. For example, Gene Hunt, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution, recently developed a method for statistically analyzing patterns of change and used it to study 53 evo- lutionary lineages ranging from mollusks to fishes and primates. In 2007, Hunt concluded that only 5% of the fossil sequences showed signs of directional change. The other 95% was about evenly split between random walks and stasis
