Restoring System from Time Machine backup - only option is older backup

I have two drives in a Mac Pro - a system drive and a data drive. Yesterday morning the system drive died. The computer hung and when I manually restarted it, I got the circle with a line icon, and then on a subsequent restart, after resetting the PRAM, I got the ? folder icon.
I restarted with the install disk in, and booted into Disk Utility. I attempted to repair the system drive, but it was reported to be corrupted and not repairable.
I installed a new drive, booted back into Disk Utility, formatted the new drive, and initiated a "restore from Time Machine".
My problem is, once the list of "complete" Time Machine backups came up, the most recent one listed was for October of this year, almost 3 months ago. In that time, Time Machine has been on and running without issue. I know there were Time Machine updates made for this computer the morning of my crash, and the day before, etc. But in terms for restoring my system, my most recent restore point is late October.
I went ahead and restored to that most recent Time Machine "complete" backup, and several hours later my system is back up and running, but as it was three months ago, not yesterday morning.
Why, if Time Machine has been performing hourly backups without fail, was I unable to restore to something more recent? If I connect to Time Machine (on a Time Capsule) from the computer in question (after the restore) and browse the backups on it, the most recent folder I see is 2011-01-14-190729 - still not as recent as I would hope (maybe the drive going bad was causing errors with very recent backups) but much more recent than October.
I would really like to be able to get my system back to a much more recent snapshot than it's at now. (I have disabled Time Machine backups on it in the meantime so as not to overwrite the backups I currently have)
Any suggestions?

Will Henderson wrote:
I would really like to be able to get my system back to a much more recent snapshot than it's at now
See #14 in [Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions|http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/FAQ.html] (or use the link in *User Tips* at the top of this forum).
On the list of backups (point g there), click the "pop-up" menu; there may be two entries there. If so select the other one -- it may have the backups you want.

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