Probably a wast of time, but with respect to your Stanley quote:
"Species that were once thought to have turned into others have been found to overlap in time with these alleged descendants. In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another."
Stanley, S.M., The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species, 1981, p. 95, speaking about the Bighorn basin in Wyoming USA.
S.M. Stanley is an American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
He wrote many articles, also together with Niles Eldredge, de co-inventor of the punctuated equilibrium theory.
One of his articles is Paleontology and earth system history in the new millennium which has been published in Geological Society of America
For more info about prof Stanley look here:
Steven M. Stanley - Wikipedia
I'm sure that you have been taken to task on this quote mine before but, just for the record, I will refer you to a more complete quote from Stanley:
A more complete quote would be:
"Superb fossil data have recently been gathered from deposits of early Cenozoic Age in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming. These deposits represent the first part of the Eocene Epoch, a critical interval when many types of modern mammals came into being. The Bighorn Basin, in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, received large volumes of sediment from the Rockies when they were being uplifted, early in the Age of Mammals. In its remarkable degree of completeness, the fossil record here for the Early Eocene is unmatched by contemporary deposits exposed elsewhere in the world. The deposits of the Bighorn Basin provide a nearly continuous local depositional record for this interval, which lasted some five million years. It used to be assumed that certain populations of the basin could be linked together in such a way as to illustrate continuous evolution. Careful collecting has now shown otherwise. Species that were once thought to have turned into others have been found to overlap in time with these alleged descendants. In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another. Furthermore, species lasted for astoundingly long periods of time. David M. Schankler has recently gathered data for about eighty mammal species that are known from more than two stratigraphic levels in the Bighorn Basin. Very few of these species existed for less than half a million years, and their average duration was greater than a million years."
So we see that Stanley wasn't talking about the fossil record in general, but the fossil record in the Bighorn Basin.
- Jon (Augray) Barber
(emphasis added)
Quote Mine Project: "Lack of Identifiable
Phylogeny"
I repeat my earlier commentary that quote mining is not just lying, it is stealing.