I hope that clarifies it now. It is practically undeniable that intermediate forms exist and the interpretation as being transitional corresponds with observations from many fields of life-science and is therefore as plausible as any scientific conclusion can get.
I understand the classification issue. That makes perfect sense to me. That's really not what I was getting at, though. I still maintain that anyone who claims this creature UNDENIABLY represents a transitional life form lacks the proof to make such a conclusive statement. In fact, I’m curious,
Emergence….are you will to say that ?.....that it is
without doubt a transitional fossil ? You seem to be tip-toeing when we get to that point.
- "By link, we mean a necessary stage of transition between classes such as reptiles and birds or between smaller groups. An animal displaying characters belonging to two different groups cannot be treated as a true link as long as the intermediate stages have not been found, and as long as the mechanisms of transition remain unknown."—*
L. du Nouy, Human Destiny, p. 58.- "The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved."—
*W.E. Swinton, Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds, Vol. 1 , p. 1.- "Perhaps the final argument against Archaeopteryx as a transitional form has come from a rock quarry in Texas. Here scientists from Texas Tech University found bird bones encased in rock layers farther down the geological column than Archaeopteryx fossils."—
Richard Bliss, Origins: Creation or Evolution, p. 46.- Two crow-sized birds were discovered in the Triassic Dockum Formation in Texas. Because of the strata they were located in, those birds would, according to evolutionary theory, be 75 million years older than Archaeopteryx!
Nature, 322 , p. 677.- "It is obvious that we must now look for the ancestors of flying birds in a period of time much older than that in which Archaeopteryx lived."—*
J. Ostrom, Science News, 112 , p. 198.- "The origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved."—*
W.E. Swinton, Biology and Comparative Physiology of Birds, Vol. 1, p. 1.- "This Jurassic bird [Archaeopteryx] stands in splendid isolation; we know no more of its presumed thecodont ancestry nor of its relation to later `proper' birds than before."—*
A.S. Romer, Notes and Comments on Vertebrate Paleontology , p. 144.- "So emphatical were all these creature-birds, that the actual origin of Aves is barely hinted at in the structure of these remarkable remains."—*
F.E. Beddard, The Structure and Classification of Birds, p. 160. - "Most authorities have admitted that Archaeopteryx was a bird because of the clear imprint of feathers in the fossil remains. The zoological definition of a bird is: `A vertebrate with feathers.' Recently, Dr. James Jensen, paleontologist at Brigham Young University, discovered in western Colorado the fossil remains of a bird thought to be as old as Archaeopteryx but much more modern in form. This would seem to give the death knell to any possible use of Archaeopteryx by evolutionists as a transitional form."—
Marvin Lubenow, "Report on the Racine Debate," in Decade of Creation, p. 65.- "No doubt it can be argued that Archaeopteryx hints of a reptilian ancestry, but surely hints do not provide a sufficient basis upon which to secure the concept of the continuity of nature. Moreover, there is no question that this archaic bird is not led up to by a series of transitional forms from an ordinary terrestrial reptile through a number of gliding types with increasing developed feathers until the avian condition is reached."—*
M. Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, p. 176.- "The age of origin of some modern group of birds is very old, in the Early Cretaceous if not before. This places them very nearly as old as Archaeopteryx, and raises the possibility that Archaeopteryx is not the temporal benchmark of a vain evolution we so often assume."—*
J. Cracraft," Phylogenic Relationships and Monophyly of Loons, Grebes, and Hesperomithiform Birds," Systematic Zoology, 31, p. 53.- "Nothing is known with certainty as to how birds arose from reptiles or from what reptilian stock."—*
E. Russell, The Diversity of Animals, p. 118.
