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have you noticed that about 50% of the groups in the image appeared in the wrong place? (if the blue line represent the fossils record).Maybe I am misunderstanding the topic, but there are many means in which the order of fossils could be predicted within the earth, if we did not study fossils prior (assuming the geologic column were constructed without any use of index fossils).
Common reference is made to the evolution of cytochrome C.
However, determining where fossils specifically are (temporally), using molecular clocks, still uses index fossils as a means of calibration.
This doesnt mean that raptors are found in the cretaceous, just because we have already found them there (which would be circular reasoning). Rather it would mean that derived feather bearing raptors would post-date primitive theropods and pre-date birds.
Where explicitly that transition would occur though, would probably be challenging to determine without any fossil that could be used in calibration.
There is a case however, in which biologists and paleontologists argued over where particular fossils would be located, in which case biologists predicted the location of hominin fossils with greater precision than paleontologists did (with use of more temporally distant fossil discoveries).
Immunological time scale for hominid evolution. - PubMed - NCBI
Paleontologists were mistaken in suggesting that ramapithecus was the first direct ancestor of modern man (see below). This being an early suggestion based on fossil finds. Ramapithecus | fossil primate genus
Ramapithecus, fossil primate dating from the Middle and Late Miocene epochs (about 16.6 million to 5.3 million years ago). For a time in the 1960s and ’70s, Ramapithecus was thought to be a distinct genus that was the first direct ancestor of modern humans (Homo sapiens) before it became regarded as that of the orangutan ancestor Sivapithecus.
"The first challenge to the theory came in the late 1960s from American biochemist Allan Wilson and American anthropologist Vincent Sarich, who, at the University of California, Berkeley, had been comparing the molecular chemistry of albumins (blood proteins) among various animal species. They concluded that the ape-human divergence must have occurred much later than Ramapithecus. (It is now thought that the final split took place some 6 million to 8 million years ago.)"
"Wilson and Sarich’s argument was initially dismissed by anthropologists, but biochemical and fossil evidence mounted in favour of it. Finally, in 1976, Pilbeam discovered a complete Ramapithecus jaw, not far from the initial fossil find, that had a distinctive V shape and thus differed markedly from the parabolic shape of the jaws of members of the human lineage. He soon repudiated his belief in Ramapithecus as a human ancestor, and the theory was largely abandoned by the early 1980s. Ramapithecus fossils subsequently were found to resemble those of the fossil primate genus Sivapithecus, which is now regarded as ancestral to the orangutan; the belief also grew that Ramapithecus probably should be included in the Sivapithecus genus."
In this case, molecular biology was used to predict the location of particular fossils of a transition, which contradicted earlier paleontological thought. And the biologists turned out to be correct, in which they argued that the first fossils for human ancestry would be discovered (or ought to be discovered if at all) closer to 6-8 million years old, as opposed to 15 million (as suggested by paleontologists). Which ultimately served to be corroborated and confirmed by later fossil discoveries such as sahelanthropus (which has human traits and chimpanzee traits and is dated to 8 million years ago as the biologists had previously predicted that such a fossil would).
So, the fossil record was used in some ways in making the predictions, however in this case, biology "out-performed" paleontology in predicting the precise temporal location of fossils (using other more distant fossils for calibration). Paleontology then basically was updated and corrected based on the latest and greatest discoveries which provided an understanding of evolution and the fossil record with higher precision than before.
I kind of understood this from yesterday's posts.
