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  1.  Most fish have anterior and posterior external nostrils. In tetrapods, the posterior nostril is replaced by the choana, an internal nostril opening into the roof of the mouth. Kenichthys, a 395-million-year-old fossil from China, is exactly intermediate between the two, having nostrils at the margin of the upper jaw (Zhu and Ahlberg 2004).

  2. A fossil shows eight bony fingers in the front fin of a lobed fish, offering evidence that fingers developed before land-going tetrapods (Daeschler and Shubin 1998).

  3. A Devonian humerus has features showing that it belonged to an aquatic tetrapod that could push itself up with its forelimbs but could not move it limbs back and forth to walk (Shubin et al. 2004).

  4. Acanthostega, a Devonian fossil, about 60 cm long, probably lived in rivers (Coates 1996). It had polydactyl limbs with no wrists or ankles (Coates and Clack 1990). It was predominantly, if not exclusively, aquatic: It had fishlike internal gills (Coates and Clack 1991), and its limbs and spine could not support much weight. It also had a stapes and a lateral sensory system like a fish.

  5. Ichthyostega, a tetrapod from Devonian streams, was about 1.5 m long and probably amphibious. It had seven digits on its rear legs (its hands are unknown). Its limbs and spine were more robust than those of Acanthostega, and its rib cage was massive. It had fishlike spines on its tail, but these were fewer and smaller than Acanthostega's. Its skull had several primitive fishlike features, but it probably did not have internal gills (Murphy 2002).

  6. Tulerpeton, from estuarine deposits roughly the same age as Acanthostega and Ichthyostega, had six digits on its front limbs and seven on its rear limbs. Its shoulders were more robust than Acanthostega, suggesting it was somewhat less aquatic, and its skull appears to be closer to later Carboniferous amphibians than to Acanthostega or Ichthyostega.

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The transition from reptile to mammal has an excellent record. The following fossils are just a sampling. In particular, these fossils document the transition of one type of jaw joint into another. Reptiles have one bone in the middle ear and several bones in the lower jaw. Mammals have three bones in the middle ear and only one bone in the lower jaw. These species show transitional jaw-ear arrangements (Hunt 1997; White 2002b). The sequence shows transitional stages in other features, too, such as skull, vertebrae, ribs, and toes.

  1. Sphenacodon (late Pennsylvanian to early Permian, about 270 million years ago (Mya)). Lower jaw is made of multiple bones; the jaw hinge is fully reptilian. No eardrum.
  2. Biarmosuchia (late Permian). One of the earliest therapsids. Jaw hinge is more mammalian. Upper jaw is fixed. Hindlimbs are more upright.
  3. Procynosuchus (latest Permian). A primitive cynodont, a group of mammal-like therapsids. Most of the lower jaw bones are grouped in a small complex near the jaw hinge.
  4. Thrinaxodon (early Triassic). A more advanced cynodont. An eardrum has developed in the lower jaw, allowing it to hear airborne sound. Its quadrate and articular jaw bones could vibrate freely, allowing them to function for sound transmission while still functioning as jaw bones. All four legs are fully upright.
  5. Probainognathus (mid-Triassic, about 235 Mya). It has two jaw joints: mammalian and reptilian (White 2002a).
  6. Diarthrognathus (early Jurassic, 209 Mya). An advanced cynodont. It still has a double jaw joint, but the reptilian joint functions almost entirely for hearing.
  7. Morganucodon (early Jurassic, about 220 Mya). It still has a remnant of the reptilian jaw joint (Kermack et al. 1981).
  8. Hadrocodium (early Jurassic). Its middle ear bones have moved from the jaw to the cranium (Luo et al. 2001; White 2002b).

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The transitional sequence from a land mammal to whales is quite robust. See Babinski (2003) or Zimmer (1998) for pictures of some of these.

  1. Pakicetus inachus: latest Early Eocene (Gingerich et al. 1983; Thewissen and Hussain 1993).
  2. Ambulocetus natans: Early to Middle Eocene, above Pakicetus. It had short front limbs and hind legs adapted for swimming; undulating its spine up and down helped its swimming. It apparently could walk on land as well as swim (Thewissen et al. 1994).
  3. Indocetus ramani: earliest Middle Eocene (Gingerich et al. 1993).
  4. Dorudon: the dominant cetacean of the late Eocene. Their tiny hind limbs were not involved in locomotion.
  5. Basilosaurus: middle Eocene and younger. A fully aquatic whale with structurally complete legs (Gingerich et al. 1990).
  6. an early baleen whale with its blowhole far forward and some structural features found in land animals but not later whales (Stricherz 1998).


The whale's closest living relative is the hippopotamus. A fossil group known as anthracotheres links hippos with whales (Boisserie et al. 2005). The common ancestor of whales and hippos likely was a primitive artiodactyl (cloven-hoofed mammal); ankle bones from the primitive whales Artiocetus and Rodhocetus show distinctive artiodactyl traits (Gingerich et al. 2001).

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I really should have visited talkorigins.org earlier

Redrawing said:

... Intelligent design is not an appeal to religion (the argument scientists have used to keep 'ID' out of school curriculum in the United States), it is an umbrella term for any number of potential or existing theories that attempt to account for the intuition that the universe MAY NOT have come about through pure, blind, random, accidental luck.

So instead of trying to account for the gaps in fossil record, or explain why the evolutionary model doesn't always fit ontological observations about biological systems, evolutionary theorists build straw men all day and knock 'em down, without ever feeling the need to assert any evidence for their own position.

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OrgoneConclusion said:

When that is all the ammunition one has...

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Mr. Mushrooms said:

Penny Patterson learned about confirmation in her first year of science education?  What went wrong?

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Paradigm shift (sometimes known as extraordinary science or revolutionary science) is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science. It is in contrast to his idea of normal science.

It has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share.” (The Essential Tension, 1997). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, “a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself.” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Once a paradigm shift is complete, a scientist cannot, for example, posit the possibility that miasma causes disease or that ether carries light. In contrast, a critic in Humanities can choose to adopt a 19th century theory of poetics, for instance, or interpret economic behaviour from a Marxist perspective.

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OrgoneConclusion said:

Because real arguments have been made and in return all I see is hand-waving. What are you waiting for? Bring out the big guns.

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That's one reason I am excited to read it.

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