Evolution

[Ronin]

Where are the fossil records of the animals that we see today? If all living things evolved to something different then how they started, where are their fossils? In museums today there are billions of dinasour bones that we have collected, yet there is not one transitional fossil. For example if we all evovled what did a lion look like before it became what it is today? There should be examples of all the animals that are alive today. And there should be several examples for every animal. Darwin himself admitted if we can't find transitional fossils,for they should be everywhere, then evolution is wrong!
So where are the fossils?

[Hexameter]

First, lets agree on a definition of a transitional fossil. Do you agree with this definition?

A transitional fossil is the fossil remains of a creature that exhibits certain primitive (or basal) traits in comparison with its more derived descendants.

Basal meaning:

basal members of a group diverged earlier than a subgroup of others

And derived meaning:

derived members of a group diverged after another member (or subgroup of members) had already diverged. The earlier members are termed basal

[Goat]

Where are the fossil records of the animals that we see today? If all living things evolved to something different then how they started, where are their fossils? In museums today there are billions of dinasour bones that we have collected, yet there is not one transitional fossil. For example if we all evovled what did a lion look like before it became what it is today? There should be examples of all the animals that are alive today. And there should be several examples for every animal. Darwin himself admitted if we can't find transitional fossils,for they should be everywhere, then evolution is wrong!
So where are the fossils?

What ever made you think there are no transitional fossils? We have plenty.

For example, This page has a list of the transitional fossils we have for horse evolution. We can do the same thing with just about any species you want.

Of course, if you want to go to the fossil record of a one cell marine animal, Don Linday collected specimens to show on a one cell marine animal has changed over 66 million years without any gaps.

[Ronin]

Are you saying there are fossils examples of all the living things we see today? I have yet to see the evolutionary bones of animals that exist today.
I mean bones showing every stage of evolution of a particular animal.

Imangine a million years from now. According to evolution we are still evolving,when scientists dig our bones up they can say this is what we looked like. I have yet heard an evolution scientist say this is what a bear looked like a million years ago. And showed the bones,and then this is what a bear looked like 2 million years ago and showed a different set of bones. My point is there should be literally billions of fossil remains of the animals that are alive today. but there are not, why? If we can dig up a dinasour that is 2 billion years old, where are all the fossils that are a million years old?

[Goat]

Are you saying there are fossils examples of all the living things we see today? I have yet to see the evolutionary bones of animals that exist today.
I mean bones showing every stage of evolution of a particular animal.

Imangine a million years from now. According to evolution we are still evolving,when scientists dig our bones up they can say this is what we looked like. I have yet heard an evolution scientist say this is what a bear looked like a million years ago. And showed the bones,and then this is what a bear looked like 2 million years ago and showed a different set of bones. My point is there should be literally billions of fossil remains of the animals that are alive today. but there are not, why? If we can dig up a dinasour that is 2 billion years old, where are all the fossils that are a million years old?

In otherwords, you want an unbroken chain. You are attempting to raise the bar of expectations what you know is too high.

Can you show me the bones of your great great grandfather? Do you know where those bones are?

Your ignornace is showing. If we dug up bones of a dinosaur that was 2 billion years old, that would falsify evolution.

I did give you that link to an unbroken chain of fossils for 66 million years to show how even a 1 cell animal can evolve.

What has happened is that we have looked for transitional fossils in areas where we know that the age of the fossils were of the right age to find, for example, a fish to land fossil. Sure enough, they found one.

They knew the fossils in this area were the right age, and the environment was correct for finding such an animal in transition, and
By gosh they found it

[Confused]

Where are the fossil records of the animals that we see today? If all living things evolved to something different then how they started, where are their fossils? In museums today there are billions of dinasour bones that we have collected, yet there is not one transitional fossil. For example if we all evovled what did a lion look like before it became what it is today? There should be examples of all the animals that are alive today. And there should be several examples for every animal. Darwin himself admitted if we can't find transitional fossils,for they should be everywhere, then evolution is wrong!
So where are the fossils?

Once again, you are relying on the "missing link". Evolution does't postulate we came from another animal. It only says we share ancestry. Darwin is a poor example for this. He spent more time on adaptation and survival of the fittest than saying man evolved from ape.

[Ronin]

One of the tecniques evolutionists use to answer questions is to use generalizations. What exactly were these animals that scientists have found? Why have we only found some of the fossils when there were billions of different specys? If these animals are alive today,there has to be a fossil record of what they looked like say a million years ago. I'm not just talking about a single celled organism.

[Goat]

Where are the fossil records of the animals that we see today? If all living things evolved to something different then how they started, where are their fossils? In museums today there are billions of dinasour bones that we have collected, yet there is not one transitional fossil. For example if we all evovled what did a lion look like before it became what it is today? There should be examples of all the animals that are alive today. And there should be several examples for every animal. Darwin himself admitted if we can't find transitional fossils,for they should be everywhere, then evolution is wrong!
So where are the fossils?

Once again, you are relying on the "missing link". Evolution does't postulate we came from another animal. It only says we share ancestry. Darwin is a poor example for this. He spent more time on adaptation and survival of the fittest than saying man evolved from ape.

to be more precise, he spend more time on adaptation and the origin of species. The term 'Survivial of the fitest' was actually coined by Herbert Spencer in his attempt to have a social equivialent of natural selection.
It originally was not used by evolution at all.

[Ronin]

Evolutionist Steven Stanley who is a paleobiologist from Johns Hopkins,concludes in his book, Macroevolution that without the transitional fossil evidence"We might wonder whether the doctrine of evolution would qualify as anything more than outrages hypothesis" in other words all the conjecture about whether Darwanian evolution is factual or not comes down to hard evidence and there simply isn't any.

[Goat]

Evolutionist Steven Stanley who is a paleobiologist from Johns Hopkins,concludes in his book, Macroevolution that without the transitional fossil evidence"We might wonder whether the doctrine of evolution would qualify as anything more than outrages hypothesis" in other words all the conjecture about whether Darwanian evolution is factual or not comes down to hard evidence and there simply isn't any.

Yes, without transitional fossils, evolution would not have much evidence.

Fortuneately for the theory of evolution, there are literrally thousands upon thousands of transitional fossils.

We do have that hard evidence. For example,

We have a number of transitional fossils of primates

GAP: "The modern assemblage can be traced with little question to the base of the Eocene" says Carroll (1988). But before that, the origins of the very earliest primates are fuzzy. There is a group of Paleocene primitive primate-like animals called "plesiadapids" that may be ancestral to primates, or may be "cousins" to primates. (see Beard, in Szalay et al., 1993.)

* Palaechthon, Purgatorius (middle Paleocene) -- Very primitive plesiadapids. To modern eyes they looks nothing like primates, being simply pointy-faced, small early mammals with mostly primitive teeth, and claws instead of nails. But they show the first signs of primate-like teeth; lost an incisor and a premolar, and had relatively blunt-cusped, squarish molars.
* Cantius (early Eocene) -- One of the first true primates (or "primates of modern aspect"), more advanced than the plesiadapids (more teeth lost, bar behind the eye, grasping hand & foot) and beginning to show some lemur-like arboreal adaptations.
* Pelycodus & related species (early Eocene) -- Primitive lemur-like primates.

The tarsiers, lemurs, and New World monkeys split off in the Eocene. The Old World lineage continued as follows:

* Amphipithecus, Pondaungia (late Eocene, Burma) -- Very early Old World primates known only from fragments. Larger brain, shorter nose, more forward-facing eyes (halfway between plesiadapid eyes and modern ape eyes).

GAP: Here's that Oligocene gap mentioned above in the timescale. Very few primate fossils are known between the late Eocene and early Oligocene, when there was a sharp change in global climate. Several other mammal groups have a similar gap.

* Parapithecus (early Oligocene) -- The O.W. monkeys split from the apes split around now. Parapithecus was probably at the start of the O.W. monkey line. From here the O.W. monkeys go through Oreopithecus (early Miocene, Kenya) to modern monkey groups of the Miocene & Pliocene.
* Propliopithecus, Aegyptopithecus (early Oligocene, Egypt) -- From the same time as Parapithecus, but probably at the beginning of the ape lineage. First ape characters (deep jaw, 2 premolars, 5- cusped teeth, etc.).
* Aegyptopithecus (early-mid Oligocene, Egypt) -- Slightly later anthropoid (ape/hominid) with more ape features. It was a fruit-eating runner/climber, larger, with a rounder brain and shorter face.
* Proconsul africanus (early Miocene, Kenya.) -- A sexually dimorphic, fruit-eating, arboreal quadruped probably ancestral to all the later apes and humans. Had a mosaic of ape-like and primitive features; Ape-like elbow, shoulder and feet; monkey- like wrist; gibbon-like lumbar vertebrae.
* Limnopithecus (early Miocene, Africa) -- A later ape probably ancestral to gibbons.
* Dryopithecus (mid-Miocene) -- A later ape probably ancestral to the great apes & humans. At this point Africa & Asia connected via Arabia, and the non-gibbon apes divided into two lines:
1. Sivapithecus (including "Gigantopithecus" & "Ramapithecus", mid- Miocene) -- Moved to Asia & gave rise to the orangutan.
2. Kenyapithecus (mid-Miocene, about 16 Ma) -- Stayed in Africa & gave rise to the African great apes & humans.

GAP: There are no known fossil hominids or apes from Africa between 14 and 4 Ma. Frustratingly, molecular data shows that this is when the African great apes (chimps, gorillas) diverged from hominids, probably 5-7 Ma. The gap may be another case of poor fossilization of forest animals. At the end of the gap we start finding some very ape-like bipedal hominids:

* Australopithecus ramidus (mid-Pliocene, 4.4 Ma) -- A recently discovered very early hominid (or early chimp?), from just after the split with the apes. Not well known. Possibly bipedal (only the skull was found). Teeth both apelike and humanlike; one baby tooth is very chimp-like. (White et al., 1994; Wood 1994)
* Australopithecus afarensis (late Pliocene, 3.9 Ma) -- Some excellent fossils ("Lucy", etc.) make clear that this was fully bipedal and definitely a hominid. But it was an extremely ape-like hominid; only four feet tall, still had an ape-sized brain of just 375-500 cc (finally answering the question of which came first, large brain or bipedality) and ape-like teeth. This lineage gradually split into a husky large-toothed lineage and a more slender, smaller- toothed lineage. The husky lineage (A. robustus, A. boisei) eventually went extinct.
* Australopithecus africanus (later Pliocene, 3.0 Ma) -- The more slender lineage. Up to five feet tall, with slightly larger brain (430-550 cc) and smaller incisors. Teeth gradually became more and more like Homo teeth. These hominds are almost perfect ape- human intermediates, and it's now pretty clear that the slender australopithecines led to the first Homo species.
* Homo habilis (latest Pliocene/earliest Pleistocene, 2.5 Ma) -- Straddles the boundary between australopithecines and humans, such that it's sometimes lumped with the australopithecines. About five feet tall, face still primitive but projects less, molars smaller. Brain 500-800 cc, overlapping australopithecines at the low end and and early Homo erectus at the high end. Capable of rudimentary speech? First clumsy stone tools.
* Homo erectus (incl. "Java Man", "Peking Man", "Heidelberg Man"; Pleist., 1.8 Ma) -- Looking much more human now with a brain of 775-1225 cc, but still has thick brow ridges & no chin. Spread out of Africa & across Europe and Asia. Good tools, first fire.
* Archaic Homo sapiens (Pleistocene, 500,000 yrs ago) -- These first primitive humans were perfectly intermediate between H. erectus and modern humans, with a brain of 1200 cc and less robust skeleton & teeth. Over the next 300,000 years, brain gradually increased, molars got still smaller, skeleton less muscular. Clearly arose from H erectus, but there are continuing arguments about where this happened.
* One famous offshoot group, the Neandertals, developed in Europe 125,000 years ago. They are considered to be the same species as us, but a different subspecies, H. sapiens neandertalensis. They were more muscular, with a slightly larger brain of 1450 cc, a distinctive brow ridge, and differently shaped throat (possibly limiting their language?). They are known to have buried their dead.
* H. sapiens sapiens (incl. "Cro-magnons"; late Pleist., 40,000 yrs ago) -- All modern humans. Average brain size 1350 cc. In Europe, gradually supplanted the Neanderthals.