I've heard and read all lot of statements by creationists that "Gradual evolution must be false because we don't have transtional fossils." Consider these facts. Aside from what we've preserved there are no other remains of the dodo bird. There are species in rain forests going extinct that won't leave a record of there existantce. And nature will try to reclaim everything if it can.
Don't beleive me? Take a walk in to a forest at some point. As your doin so, look for fallen trees. Look at it. probe it. Had it allen recently? If no, noticed how it seemed like soil. Most trees that fall in the woods or burn in forest fires are broken down by other organisms meant to consume this material. Most bioms thrive on these regular events. So where do petrified trees come from?
To petrify wood you must stop decomposition In order to stop the decomposition process, you must stop life on all scales in a given area. We have such an area in our modern day. The blast area of Mt. St. Helens. The blast streilized the area and deposited kilotons of minerals. without the typical decomposing agents around or able to be introduced do to being buried in all that ash the trees didn't break down, and are now petrifing. Did the minerals act as a catalyst? Unknown, though the process is only taking decades instead of millenium as once thought.
Now how many other eruptions like Mt. St. Helens have happened in our recorded history? Not many. And none of them caused a mass extinction. They only caused localized deposits. There is geological evidence of such geological (and at least one astrological) events occuring. Typically a basic elment for life to florish (light, water, etc.) is in exreme short supply do to one of these events and it effects all life when it does. It's Typically during these times that you find most of your future fossils. The rest of the time nature reclaims. Take a look at documentries. Animal fossils were once animal bones, we have various canines breaking them down, do you believe that our modern time is the only one with a life form to fill that niche? and what happens to all those water buffalo skulls that don't get eaten by the canines, do they just lie around? Remember that some plants root in the cracks in solid rock and get mineral nourishment form the rock, bones shouldn't be that difficult.
The point is nature reclaims when it can, which is often. The only times it can't are rare but do happen from time to time, and it from those times we get our largest fossil finds.
Still not convinced. Let's take a look at a 75 toyota celica and a 96 toyota celica in a used car lot, and this is the only evidence your presented of the celicas existance. If this is all you had to go on you might think the the 96 was revamp and radical redesign of the 75. Is that correct? No. the toyota celica was in production from 1971 to about 2003, each year a gradual redesign. But, without the other cars or any other evidence of them, you can only speculte as to what they look like. You might find evidence that states one of your specualtions of the in betweens was wrong, but looking at this example which theory is more incorrect, That there were designs in between that we haven't been able to see or that that there were none. And what happens to either theory if a potential in between is found. Gradual transistion does a slight readjustment to comply with the new data. Stagered transtion needs to explain away a whole new reason for a whole new species.
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Added blank lines between paragraphs.
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