What transitional fossils have been found?

Question

What transitional fossils have been found?

Answer 1

The point about "transitional forms" that people often fail to grasp is that EVERYTHING is a "transitional form". The kangaroos of today are transitional between the proto-kangaroos of a million years ago, and whatever kangaroos evolve into over the next million years.

It is just that, for some organisms, we are fortunate enough to have a more-or-less complete fossil record of all the different forms they evolved through to reach their current form. The horse is an excellent example of this.

The creationist insistence that we *must* find a full fossil record for everything before they will accept evolution is [1] unreasonable (as fossilisation is a rare event), and [2] impossible, as it actually doubles the problem every time a new transitional fossil is discovered:

Let's say I have a fossil organism (A) from two million years ago which I believe is related to a modern organism (C). The creationist can insist that I find an intermediate before they consider this as plausible.

Maybe I'm lucky, and we do indeed find an intermediate (B) from 1 million years ago, which is morphologically halfway between A and C.

The creationist will now insist that I find an intermediate between A and B, and between B and C: I have just doubled the problem.

Answer 2

Numerous ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tra...

Answer 3

Thanks to jim76107 for demonstrating the tactic of blatant *DECEIT* known as quote mining ... presenting carefully edited partial quotes from respected scientists in order to twist their words ... in this case  implying that people like Patterson or Gould are "admitting" that there are no transitional fossils ... which of course is blatantly false.

CPM nicely clarifies this by providing the Patterson, Stanley, and Gould quotes in context.

So keep it up jim76107.   You just confirm the already rampant perception that Creationism is built by people deceitful enough to falsify information ... and the people gullible enough to believe it.

Answer 4

Quote

1 Dr. Patterson / British Museum of  Natural History

I will lay it on the line - there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favored by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test.

Steven Stanley / Professor Johns Hopkins University

Having carefully scrutinized data from the fossil record during the past decade, however, I have demonstrated a biological stability for species of animals and plants that I think would have shocked Darwin. Certainly it has jolted many modern evolutionists.

Stephen Jay Gould / Harvard

In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record -- geologically "sudden" origins of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis) - reflect the predictions of this new evlolutionary theory...

As far as the other so called transistions, you really have to look at what evidence they have, sometimes they will put a whole animal "together" from a couple teeth and a part of the jaw and a small piece of the skull. Like with the whale evolution. Then they will hire an artist to draw what the animal looked like, carefully making its mannerisims and posture reflect the line they are trying to suggest.

You can line up a knive, spoon, spork, fork. But that is not evidence for anything exept for your trying to find evidence for your world view.

Answer 5

As usual, the creationist (jim76107) is using partial truths lies and distortions. Fortunately they all use the same talking points so his answer is easy to refute.

1 Dr. Patterson / British Museum of Natural History-

The quote is from a personal letter dated 10th April 1979 from Dr. Patterson to creationist Luther D. Sunderland and is referring to Dr. Patterson's book "Evolution" (1978, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.).

When questioned about this however Dr Patterson clearly indicates that he was misquoted by Sunderland  

“That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else.”

2. Steven Stanley….was talking about the stability of certain species..ie sharks, compared to others which have undergone significant evolution…

If you finish the quote it goes on to say…..

“Having carefully scrutinized data from the fossil record during the past decade, however, I have demonstrated a biological stability for species of animals and plants that I think would have shocked Darwin. Certainly it has jolted many modern evolutionists. . . . Once established, an average species of animal or plant will not change enough to be regarded as a new species, even after surviving for ahundred thousand, or a million, or even ten million generations . . . Something tends to prevent the wholesale restructuring of a species, once it has become established on earth.

The stability of species is all the more remarkable when we observe that dramatically new kinds of animals and plants have indeed appeared in very little geological time."

3. Stephen J Gould was discussing the speed of evolution with regard to0 his ideas on punctuated equilibrium versus gradualism (gradual evolution)…a variation of evolutionary theory.

In gradualism, there is no such thing as a transitional species. Or, everything is a transitional species. All species are in flux, so every fossil is a transitional fossil. Every animal is essentially suited to its environment, or it would die out quickly. The "transitional forms" you're seeking are the variability within the species at any given point.

Except that the paleontologists I quoted said that nobody can find much variability within species. That is the whole problem in a nutshell. No evidence of significant variation.

Gould's point is that this gradualist argument is too pat. In fact, where we do observe several fossils of the same species, they show more similarity than you might expect. In fact, with fossils distributed so thinly, you'd expect to never find two of the same species if the change is continual and gradual.

Gould's argument is that species change happens much more suddenly than that. . . But they rapidly reach a steady state and the species are stable until the next catastrophe comes along.

These are discussions as to the nature of evolution. Not whether evolution as a whole has occurred….

Answer 6

There are way too many transitional fossils to list here.

This is a good start:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-tran...

This site looks at the skulls of human transitionals and gives comments from a theistic point-of-view:

http://www.theistic-evolution.com/transi...

Lots of information on horse evolution here:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/horses/h...

Answer 7

Every dead dog that isn't a wolf and isn't a mini-dachshund might be considered a transitional fossil between gray wolves and mini-dachshunds.

If you look only at gray wolves and mini-dachshunds, you wouldn't classify them in the same species.

Answer 8

none that weren't proven false later.

Answer 9

Millions of them.   Practically all fossils in between the very primitive to the present day species, could be considered transitional, if they differ from what is here today.    Primitive reptile-like birds and primitive horses with three toes are good examples.