One Question for Evo-Bashers

Well, John, maybe not all of them were transitional. Some surely were fossilized without leaving offspring.

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There's your key..."imagination"...it is only in the imaginary fantasy world that a mouse would become a rabbit....if you don't have step by step gradual changes, it undermines your whole theory.

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But you don't have to imagine this sort of thing - you can go to museums (or at least go to the paleontological literature) and see for yourself where exactly this sort of thing has happened: from lobe-finned fish to tetrapods, from "reptile-like" tetrapods to "mammal-like" ones, from quadrupedal amphibious mammals to whales, from Hyracotherium to a huge variety of mostly extinct horses... and that's just a few of the vertabrates. And these all happened in our real world - no fantasy involved.

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Why can't their be endotherm members of the reptilian class?

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As I understand it, the newer classifications with a cladistic leaning don't view Reptilia as a valid classification anyway. Crocodiles and pigeons are apparently more closely related than either is to cobras, and we mammals share a common ancestor with all three of them.

Amniotes, along with modern amphibians, may all be descended from Acanthostega or some similar beast. I don't think that the fossil record is quite complete or detailed enough as yet to say with any authority whether amniotes proper arose once or twice. I'm currently reading Gaining Ground by Jennifer Clack, and that seems to me what she is implying - and she's one of the heavy hitters in the Devonian/Carboniferous paleo game.

Kingdom, Phylum, ??, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. How about Many Volcanoes Erupt Moldy Jam Sandwiches, Usually Not Palatable?[This message has been edited by Coragyps, 01-04-2003]