quote:
Say an early species is a 1 and a modern decendant is a 10. If we are lucky we might find 1, 2, 4, 5, 8 and 9 in the fossil record. Where is 3? Maybe we haven't found it yet. Maybe it didn't exist for a very long period of time, or there weren't many of them, or it just didn't die in the right place to get fossilized. But not having #3 does not detract from the fact that we have the others and that the pattern is clear.
What anti-Evolution people like to say is this: "Yeah, you have all those, but where's the missing link between 1 and 2?"
Then someone will discover 1.5 and they say, "Okay, but where's the one between 1 and 1.5?" "Where's the one between 1.25 and 1.5" etc
It doesn't end. No matter how many examples you find, there is always one in between two that you have.
I'd like to add to this by mentioning that it's not as much a "1-10" scale as a "1-1000+" scale. Basically, it's going to take more than 10 transitions to get a drastic change (reptile to bird, for instance). The problem is that fossils actually aren't as prevelant as you (the OP) made them sound. There certainly aren't millions of fossils for any particular chain you look at (a particular reptile to a bird, for instance). There are actually very few. This makes it incredibly hard to find fossils for every single step in an evolutionary process in which there could be thousands of these so-called "steps".
The reason that we might have lots of fossils of one species of something as compared to others is mostly a result of location and natural occurances. If something is covered away and protected from weathering, it is going to have a greater chance of producing a fossil than something else (like the ashes Nuggin described). Some of these occurances can happen quite often in an area, preserving fossils for everything in that area but not in other areas around it.