Can someone please explain to me the concept of the "missing link"?

Question

p.s. this isn't a homework question i'm just curious (I'm still on summer break btw)

Answer 1

This question was asked just under an hour ago by someone else. I would be very interested to know whether this is just coincidence, or a homework question (no harm in that, if you follow up some of the links yourself), or someone is trying to convert people to creationism.

Here is the answer that I gave then; there are other good answers as well:

In Darwin's time, there were far fewer fossils known and classified and there are now, and there was a big gap between humans and their ape ancestors. This was called "the missing link", and a lot of people (including even Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently developed the theory of natural selection) thought that humans were a special creation.

Now, there are so many intermediate fossils that the problem is to tell the difference between our ancestors and our great uncles. There is an entire recent book on the subject written by real experts:

Sawyer, G.J., Deak, D., Sarmiento, E., & Milner, R. (2007) The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans, Yale University Press.

Answer 2

Our morphology is not unilinear, there is not transitional species that we know for certain. Our basis on grouping together species is based on physiological and morpholgical traits. The missing link is the species that will connect one species to another, for example big foot is considered a missing link because he would be that transition from apes to humans.