#transitional form

[alphynix]

Enaliarctos mealsi, an early seal from the Late Oligocene and Early Miocene of California, USA (~23-20 mya).

Measuring about 1.5m long (5′), it was a transitional form between modern seals and their more otter-like ancestors. It was well-adapted for swimming with a flexible spine and flipper-like limbs, but unlike most modern pinnipeds it probably used both its front and hind flippers for propulsion.

Its teeth also still resembled those of terrestrial carnivores, with slicing carnassials at the back of its jaws. This suggests that it had to drag larger prey items back to shore in order to tear them apart and eat them, similar to the behavior of modern otters.

[alphynix]

Kulindroplax perissokomos, a mollusc from the mid-Silurian of England (~428-423 mya).

About 4cm long (1.6″), it had a wormlike body covered in spicules (tiny spines) which suggests it was a member of the aplacophoran molluscs -- but it also had a row of seven larger shells along its back resembling those of chitons.

Modern aplacophorans are all shell-less and were traditionally thought to be a very early branch of the mollusc lineage that retained a “primitive” ancestral body plan. More recently, however, a combination of genetic evidence and fossil discoveries of animals like Kulindroplax have revealed that they’re actually close relatives of the chitons and instead lost their shells much more recently during the course of their evolution.

[kitemanx]

“Show me an animal turning into a totally different animal”

Some creationists claim evolution is false because “you cannot see it happen – we do not see one animal turning into another”.

At one level, they are right.  It does not matter how hard you look, you will not find a frog giving birth to a fish, nor a monkey giving birth to a human. But that’s not how evolution works.

Go stand in front of a mirror with your parents. See how similar you are? Good, you’re probably related. But look at the differences – see the subtle difference is jawline, or ear size? The tiny differences in eye-colour?

Good, because those tiny differences are the scale upon which evolution works – there is no great leap from one species to another, but thousands upon thousands of tiny, shuffling steps get you, eventually, from one species to the next.

You can watch a video of bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics; https://youtu.be/plVk4NVIUh8

Creationists dismiss it because the organisms at the end are “still bacteria”, neglecting the fact that these new bacteria have totally different biochemistries, with abilities that the original bacteria did not possess, and were not “lurking in their DNA”. Yes, they are still bacteria, but they are now a different species of bacteria, after only a few hundred generations.

These tiny steps cause even more confusing for creationists, because they prevent science identifying the point at which one species becomes another. In the history of Life, “species” is an arbitrary division.

Imagine you have a family photo album, but it magically contains photos of every generation of your ancestors, all the way back for a thousand years. You flick a page to see your parents, and your grandparents, and you can clearly see that they are your family. Now turn all the way to the end, look at the photo taken as the Normans invaded England. You can clearly and easily see that they are not really your family. The differences are huge. But flick that same span a page at a time. Every time you flick a page, you can see the obvious similarities that show each generation is related to the one before. Family.

Eventually you get to that Norman invader again, the one that is obviously not related to you, but at no point in that journey through history could you point at a single person and say “that is where my family stops”.

But this photo album is magic, remember? We can go further. Further and further. Thousands, millions, billions of years, all the way back to the original abiogenetic blob, floating around the edge of a deep-sea volcanic vent, four billion years in the deep past. It is easy to think that there is no relationship between that barely-visible dot and the complex mammal flicking through the pages of the magical photo album, but, just like before, there will have been no photo at which you could point and say “this far and no more, beyond this point they are not my family”. Every single photo is a tiny step, transitioning from one generation to the next.

The evolutionary record is just like that magical photo album, but it’s broken.  Most of your ancestors managed to avoid getting their photo taken (fossilizing), and many of the pages of the album are stuck together and the photos remain unseen (fossils yet to be unearthed). In that case, each turn of the page spans many thousands of generations, and it is easy to see how one photo differs to the next. That is where and how scientists define species.

And this evolution goes on. Humans only recently gained the ability to digest milk, and some members of our species have developed a form of red blood cell that resists malarial infection (these differences are so recent, though, that we can easily breed with these new humans, because they are not different enough to be labelled as a different species). We have recently found fish, blennies, that spend most of their lives crawling over exposed rocks with strong, muscular fins, surviving happily in a way that would kill most of their ancestors.

So, go and look in the mirror.

You are looking at a transitional form. You are looking at evolution in action.

[ailurinae]

I had missed this 2009 discovery of a transitional seal

[divineirony]

Why creationists hate Tiktaalik. ...If evolution is true, and if life on Earth originated in water, then there must have once been fish species possessing primitive limbs, which enabled them to spend some part of their lives on land. And these species, in turn, must be the ancestors of four-limbed, land-living vertebrates like us. Sure enough, in 2004, scientists found one of those transitional species: Tiktaalik roseae, a 375-million-year-old Devonian period specimen discovered in the Canadian Arctic by paleontologist Neil Shubin and his colleagues. Tiktaalik, explains Shubin on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, is an "anatomical mix between fish and a land-living animal." "It has a neck," says Shubin, a professor at the University of Chicago. "No fish has a neck. And you know what? When you look inside the fin, and you take off those fin rays, you find an upper arm bone, a forearm, and a wrist." Tiktaalik, Shubin has observed, was a fish capable of doing a push-up. It had both lungs and gills. In sum, it's quite the transitional form...

[greenwhitegold]

Evolutionary scientists impose their dogmatic ideas to public in every publication, in universities etc. By now we encountered many scientific hoaxes by evolutionary scientists like Piltdown Man, Ardi, so many other ones and most lately Ida. In the end all of these fossils turned out to be fake transitional-forms either completely imaginary or literally produced by the evolutionist scientists, themselves.  In some publications they admit these hoaxes and halfheartedly apologize. In the above article the Guardian writers give examples of these very important and inexcusable hoaxes of evolution theory. But in the end they somehow manage to find a so-called excuse for their lies. A lie cannot have an excuse. Indeed, if a new scientific information is to be made available to public by a scientist, the parties should be very very careful about the information they give. Because when they find a fossil they don't say "this may be a transtional form", they sound very sure and say to the public that "this fossil is definitely a transitional-form fossil. This is the absolute truth". NO, IT'S NOT. Evolutionary scientists should learn to leave their dogmatic ideas behind when they are in the lab.