Imagine the cute and cuddly Penguin went extinct before we knew what it was. Some evo digs up a fossil of the cuddly critter. Look watson! We found a seal to bird intermediate! Or or, a bird to seal intermediate! Good job sherlock!
Except, we could easily identify it as a true bird, not a 'seal to bird' intermediate (such a thing would disprove evolution entirely - according to evolution, species cannot cross taxa, they can only split into sub-taxa).
Skeletons hold a lot more information than you seem to think.
How many other birds/mammals/animals we could use for this illustration. Countless. Yet, somehow, amazingly, everytime an evo puts an "intermediate" tag on a fossil we're just supposed to accept it as such.
Uhhh, no thanks. Just because you call it a transitional, doesn't make it...transitional. They have NO IDEA. Whatever it takes to keep the myth alive.
Scientists, by and large, don't use the term 'transitional fossil', because they understand that, in evolution,
every fossil is a 'transition'. To label a given species as a 'transitional fossil' begs the question as to what makes it a transition, and not a species in its own right. No, we fully understand why Creationists continually demand more and more transitional fossils: they don't understand what it is they're asking for.
That said, we can still present interesting species which exist as vanguards to a large ecological niche. There must have been a 'first land vertebrate', and we used the theory of evolution to deduce when it must have lived, and then used geology to work out which geological stratum that corresponds to. We then looked for an exposed area of that stratum, and we dug. Lo and behold, we found
exactly what we're looking for:
Tiktaalik. So much for evolution not being able to make predictions.
Then there are those pesky "living fossils" that the evo's don't ever mention.[/quote]
Except, of course,
we do (there you have TalkOrigins, a pro-evolution site, talking about living fossils). Not only are living fossils discovered by evolutionists, they are used
by evolutionists
for the theory of evolution. Besides, what's to talk about? Species can adapt to environmental change via evolution, but if the environment doesn't change, then neither will the species.
No one said species
have to experience great morphological changes over time.