Bible and "kind"

I can envision the members of a certain species of tarantula having a debate on evolution. One tarantula points to hominids, pointing out the evidence that humans evolved from other primates, and the creationist spider saying (okay, everyone in unison): But they're still apes!

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The animals that came off the ark had a huge amount of genetic material,

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One pair of dogs had a huge amount of genetic material? I suppose the dogs were St. Bernards, and carried entire gene samples in the casks under their necks?

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"A transitional is an organism on the evolutionary path from one taxa to another taxa."

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This is not the definition of "transitional". That is because it would be a useless definition. We don't expect to find many fossils of species that are in the direct path from one taxon to another - usually the most that can be hoped for is to find close cousins of such direct ancestors. And even if such a fossil is found, it is not in general possible to determine whether, in fact, the species is a direct ancestor - it may merely be a closely related cousin of an ancestor. The current debates in the field of human evolution is a demonstration of this, as there is quite a bit of controversy on which, if any, of the fossil hominids are actually direct human ancestors. The best that we can say is that the fossils are clearly close enough to the actual ancestors to be able to make some definite statements about their characteristics.-

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But we know that modern reptiles are not descended from salamanders, they are cousins(according to the evolutionary model).

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The important criterion would be whether salamanders share enough characteristics of the common ancestor to be useful in reaching conclusions about reptile evolution. If so, then they would be properly called "transitionals". If they have evolved to much to be reliable indicators about the common ancestor then, no, they would not be examples of transitionals.