It is impossible for ANY fossil to count for evidence of evolution. Why? Because scientists, historians, or anybody for that matter, cannot prove that those fossils had ANY kids, let alone kids who were different than their parents.
We don't need to know if specific individuals had offspring. We aren't tracking individual family lines, we're tracking the evolution of entire species. We can easily see the chronological order that the fossils existed in through the geologic record, and it's easy to see the similarities in various organisms.
I saw a Uniformitarianism thread earlier and I would just like to bring up that if we don't see these transitions now, even to a very small degree, then why should we expect there to have beeen transitions in the past? Therefore, why should we label something a transitional fossil when we don't see any transitions occuring in the thousands of species that we have observed over the last several hundred years? Are we to assume that Uniformitarianism is false?
We
do see transitionals today. Let me point out a few examples. Every feature of every organism in existance is a slightly altered version of the same feature in another species. Vestigial organs are a great example.
Human beings have an organ we call the appendix - it's basically useless. We can remove it without adversely affecting our lives, and it actually carries a rather high risk of infection that can lead to death. It's what we call a vestigial organ - it directly corresponds to the cecum of the alimentary canal of most other mammals. It's the same ogan, in the same spot - humans have simply evolved in such a way that we don't need it. In this way humans are directly related to "lower" mammals.
Let's take a look at insect wings. Most flying insects posess two pairs of wings. Dragonflies are a great example. But other insects don't use that second pair as wings - they're just a little bit different from their relatives. Flies, for example, use their second pair of wings as a kinfd of natural gyroscopic system to help them stabilize their flight. Beetles use their second set of wings as a shell that covers their flight pair. They're all examples of the same feature (the second set of wings) being slighty different from the same feature on other related species.
Most Creationists start out thinking that transitionals should be some sort of half-breed Chimaera-type monstrosity, like a half-dog, half-pig, or an ape-man. But that's just Hollywood sensationalism. It has
nothing at all to do with what evolution actually predicts. Transitional species are simply a species that exists between its ancestors and its descendants, and bears features of both. In that respect,
every species living is transitional, becuase every feature of every species is a slightly altered version of the same feature on a related species. No feature is unique - it's exactly what we would expect to see if common ancestry is true.
Other examples of transitionals would be most amphibians - they exist partway between water-dwelling organisms and fully land-bound creatures. Lungfish are another example. Whales and their ancestors are an example of a transition from land-dwelling to water-bound.
So, as you can see, there are
many examples of transitional species that we see today. All of them are transitional!
Going back to the fossil record, now, you and the OP author really need to understand a little about the fossilization process. It's insanely rare. Every organism, and even every
species, is not represented in the fossil record. We don't expect it to be - the percentage of creatures that become fossilizes is just too low to expect such a complete record. We sometimes get lucky - a volcano will erupt, or some other local event will flash-preserve a large number of fossils in a single area. It's like getting a decent (though incomplete) snapshot of life as it existed in that area at that moment in time. But conditions are not normally conducive to fissilization. Biological organisms decay, and are eaten by scavengers, etc. We can't possibly expect to see an example of every generation of organism that has ever existed. We are
lucky when we find fossils, that's all.
So having "missing links" rather than a contiguous chain is all we can possibly hope for. Asking for steps 1 through 100,000 on chronological orgder is simply unrealistic - we aren't going to find them all, even assuming that they all existed. But, as you should have learned in geometry, we don't need every point on the line to see the line. If we have fossils of 1, 343, 43545, 43676, etc, we can still say "wow, those species are related! They all have very similar features as opposed to some other species, and the closer they are chronologically, the more similarities there are!"
I think the author of this thread has a good point, though. If evolution is true, geologists and biologists should expect to find all kinds of transitional forms, and not just for a few changes, but for every change. And I also cannot believe that the link posted showing the reptile-to-bird transitions actually included Archaeopterix (sp?). That was proven false years ago!!! Some Chinese farmer dug up a fossil and glued a piece onto it and sold it to National Geographic for thousands of dollars!!! National Geographic was so excited about the possibility of finding a rare transitional form (which should not be rare if evolution is true) that they bought into a fake. They had to report it was a fake in a later article stating that they had been duped. How do we know that if Archaeopterix is the only one that people have lied to the public about?
Archeopterix was not a single find. Several examples have been found - it's a real fossil, not a hoax. And it's hardly the only example we have of uncanny similarities between birds and dinosaurs - there's more to a bird than feathers. The unique lung structure of birds (where they essentially simultaneously inhale and exhale, a necessity for flight) has long been brought up by proponents of Creationism and Intelligent Design. But, as it turns out, we see various dinosaur fossils with
nearly identical lung structure!
Here's an article.
quote:
A recent paper in Nature (11), shows that theropod dinosaurs have vertebrae pneumatized in a way that is very similar to modern birds. The authors have investigated the well preserved fossil of a theropod dinosaur called Majungatholus atopus and have found that the vertebrae possess very close similaritiies in pneumaticity compared with an extant bird (the sarus crane).
If you look at the pictures directly below the part I quoted, you'll see how amazingly similar the dinosaur fossils are to the structure of modern avians.
And it's not just the lungs, either. It's long been observed that many dinosaurs had bone structure (particularly the hips) that is very birdlike, as opposed to the structure of modern reptiles.
Transitional species are all around us, both today and in the fossil record. The evidence is there if you care to examine it. Every single prediction of evolution is verified by the fossil record and existing species. To falsify it, all you need to do is show an example of a truly unique organism - one whose features are so totally alien to all other life that they bear no similarity at all to any species ever found. Evolution predicts that no feature should be truly unique, and what we have found is that there are no truly unique features.
Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.
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