Bloggasm

I had to click on and read this story, simply because of the title the New York Times used: Fossil Looked Like a Duck and Swam Like a Duck:

It looked like a duck. It swam like a duck. It is not known if it quacked like a duck.

It definitely was not a duck.

Filling a gap in what is known about the evolution of birds, scientists have dug up fossils of one that lived 110 million years ago and looked remarkably like a small modern-day water bird.

One of the most-used arguments that anti-evolutionists use is the fact that there are gaps (sometimes large ones) in the fossil records. This argument is largely flawed for two reasons:

1. Major fossil finds are few and far between. Many of these fossils are thousands or millions of years old, and most never make it to the fossil stage. Which brings me to the next one:

2. A lot of animals just don’t fossilize very well. And on top of that, there’s lots of environments where fossilization is almost impossible (too much bacteria or moisture, or something along those lines). So if one of our evolutionary ancestors lived in one of these areas which are bad for fossils, then most likely not a single fossil exists.

It should be noted, however, that whenever we do find new fossils, they rarely, if ever, disagree with the theory of evolution.

Related interviews: Gene Expression, Science and Politics