As I’ve said before, considering the conditions under which they are assembled it’s a wonder than newspapers get anything right.
The Los Angeles Times ran a story on the discovery of an intermediate fossil find in Ethopia. The discovery fills in a space in the Afarensis line of descent.
The Times story referred to the space as a “missing gap.”
Now that’s really gone.
Heh. 
The missing gap was almost discovered once before, but they had a near miss.
How does it go now?
Last night upon the bedroom stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
Oh how I wish he'd go away.
The missing-gap term sounds perfectly appropriate to me. The fossil discovered is an intermediate that wasn’t supposed to be there, but now is. Therefore, the gap is missing.
Slight hijack: I have not put a lot of trust in newspapers since I started working as a medical examiner. They have never run a single story in which I was involved in which there was not something wrong. From minor details to… major.
Several years ago there was a dreadful domestic murder in which a drunk man killed his drunk middle-aged wife. To dispose of the body, he realized he would have to cut off her breasts, which had very expensive (and very old) breast implants in them with serial numbers. (He could have just taken out the implants, but that required a degree of surgical expertise he did not possess. Came nowhere near possessing.)
When we got the body, it was a nude dump in an alley with duct tape over the breast amputation sites, and we were dreadfully afraid we had us a serial killer.
Headline of article next day in a major national newspaper that was once, shall we say, responsible for the downfall of a President: “Decapitated Woman Found in Alley”
Decapitated?
Decapitated???
For breasts cut off?
Would you call that a minor detail?
One police officer visiting us on another homicide said he could explain it. Picture a nasty old grizzled police sergeant, he said, and an up-to-date, twenty-something female reporter in a hurry. Imagine that the sergeant guffaws and says, “They cut off the most important part of a woman.” The female reporter: “Right!”
Otherwise, it’s inexplicable.
Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith reported that years and years ago the word “rape” was never printed in that paper. “Assault” or “assaulted” was used as a replacement. So a story might read something like:
Oh God. Snork. I suppose.