Debunking Transitional Fossils: Archaeopteryx & Tiktaalik

In both of these textbooks, they showed pictures of the Archaeopteryx fossil, supposedly half dinosaur and half bird.

Yeah, it was discovered in 1861. Alan Fiducia, a paleontologist who led studies in the origins of birds, said this back in 1993.

Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earthbound feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It's a bird.

A perching bird. No amount of paleobabble is going to change that. Since making that statement, there has been a constant battle into evolutionary camp about whether Archaeopteryx should be even considered an ancestor to birds, and many are making the case that it should be thrown out of the evolutionary lineup, going from being a bird to a dinosaur and then back to a bird.

Archaeopteryx was even further disqualified as an evolutionary ancestor for birds when scientists found what appears to be a crow -sized bird and extinct four -winged birds in rock layers designated to be below those containing

Archaeopteryx. Talk about throwing a wild pitch. Wild pitches happen often in the game of evolution, like the fossil called

Tiktaalik. It quickly became the missing link between fish and four -legged creatures that first walked on land.

Oh yeah, I heard of that. It was kind of the star of transitional fossils. But then, in 2010, scientists announced in the journal

Nature that they had found footprints of a four -legged land creature in Poland that are supposedly 10 million years older than Tiktaalik.

So there goes Tiktaalik as a clear transitional fossil, and yet, here it is, still in our textbook. Like I said, there should be millions of transitional fossils, so if evolutionary theory can only suggest a few, and those few have major problems, it discredits the theory.