Thanks Bex,

Quote
Like CTD, I must have gotten lost in the words and forgot to spot the substance/evidence.
Maybe you need to read the articles in all the links to see the actual evidence and if those are not enough then contact the authors for more. What is provided here is necessarily just a summary of the evidence.

Quote
. I personally did not see the line up of transitional fossils for the bat evolution senario,
So? Does the absence of one set of transitional fossils negate all the others? Of course not, all it means is that between (ancient shrew/mole-like tree climbing insectivore) and the intermediate bat fossil found we have a case of "we don't know" - which does not mean that it did not occur or that it did occur, but that we don't know. There will always be some gaps until we know everything eh? This does not mean that we don't know anything though does it?

What we DO see is that the bat fossil has more "primitive" traits compared to modern bats, such as claws on all fingers and longer hind legs, traits that would be found in a (shrew\mole-like tree climbing insectivore), and that in comparison to this fossil the modern bat traits are more "derived" - they have evolved since this early fossil to be more developed for bat life.
[Linked Image]

That is still a fact. This still makes this bat fossil an intermediate between a tree climbing insectivore and modern bats.

This bat is one of those along the "line up of transitional fossils for the bat evolution senario" whether there are earlier fossils or not.

Quote
... we clearly see the same to this day with animals and variations within the same kind. I am asking you for the bat evolution senario presented in actual evidence, so we can look and see how the creature evolved and what it was like originally, through it's evolution and to what we observe today.
And yet I have already provided evidence of this kind of transition with the therapsids, and the transition from reptile to mammal. One wonders why you ignore that evidence to focus on the bat fossils: this is a much larger transition than one mammal lineage.

Message 42059

Originally Posted by RAZD
For instance we have the evolution of mammals from reptiles, from The Therapsid - Mammal Transitional Series:

Quote
Although Archaeopteryx is by far the best-known of the transitional fossils, it is not the only one, or even the best. The fossil transition from reptile to mammal is one of the most extensive and well-studied of all the transitions, and detailed series of fossils demonstrate how this transition was accomplished.

Taxonomically, mammals are distinguished by a number of features, the most obvious of which are hair (even such aquatic mammals as whales and dolphins still retain bristly hairs in their skin), and the presence of mammary glands which secrete milk, used to nourish the young. Neither of these structures is preserved in the fossil record, but fortunately, mammals can also be distinguished by a number of skeletal characteristics (particularly in the skull and teeth). In particular, mammals are distinguished from reptiles by a number of skeletal traits. Reptiles have a much larger number of individual bones in their skulls than do mammals. In reptiles, the teeth are all of the same shape, and although they vary slightly in size, they all have the same simple cone-shaped form. Mammals, however, possess a number of different types of teeth in their jaws, from the flat, multi-cusped molar teeth to the sharp cone-shaped canines. In reptiles, the lower jaw is made up of a number of different bones, and the jaw joint is formed between the quadrate bone in the skull and the angular bone in the jaw. In mammals, by contrast, the lower jaw is made up of a single bone, the dentary, which articulates with the squamosal bone in the skull to form the jaw joint. Reptiles also have a single bone in the middle ear, the stapes. In mammals, there are three bones in the middle ear, the malleus, incus and stapes (also known as the hammer, anvil and stirrup). At the top of the skull, reptiles have a small hole through which the pineal body, or "third eye", extends--this is absent in mammals. Finally, the reptilian skull is attached to the spine by a single point of contact, the occipital condyle. In mammals, the occipital condyle is double-faced.
All of these skeletal differences are seen to evolve in the transitional series of synapsids through therapsids through cynodonts to mammals, a transition that covers millions of years and hundreds of fossils, each with intermediate variations.

As part of the evolution of mammal from reptile the three bone jaw and single bone ear of reptiles change from generation to generation to generation to generation until we have a single bone jaw and three bone ear in mammals, and at one stage of this evolutionary transition there are - not one but - several intermediate fossils that have double hinged jaws, one at the "reptile" location and one at the new "mammal" location, a fully functional jaw with extra articulation:

Quote
The earliest therapsids show the typical reptilian type of jaw joint, with the articular bone in the jaw firmly attached to the quadrate bone in the skull. In later fossils from the same group, however, the quadrate-articular bones have become smaller, and the dentary and squamosal bones have become larger and moved closer together. This trend reaches its apex in a group of therapsids known as cynodonts, of which the genus Probainognathus is a representative. Probainognathus possessed characteristics of both reptile and mammal, and this transitional aspect was shown most clearly by the fact that it had TWO jaw joints--one reptilian, one mammalian: ...

In a slightly later group, known as the ictidosaurians, the mammalian part of the double jaw joint seen in Probainognathus was strengthened, while the old reptilian part was beginning to become reduced in size. In describing a member of this group known as Diarthrognathus, paleontologists Colbert and Morales point out: "The most interesting and fascinating point in the morphology of the ictidosaurians (at least, as seen in Diarthrognathus) was the double jaw articulation. In this animal, not only was the ancient reptilian joint between a reduced quadrate and articular still present, but also the new mammalian joint between the squamosal and dentary bones had come into functional being. Thus, Diarthrognathus was truly at the dividing line between reptile and mammal in so far as this important diagnostic feature is concerned." (Colbert and Morales, 1991, p. 128)

The therapsid-mammal transition was completed with the appearence of the Morganucodonts in the late Triassic. This group is described by paleontologist T.S. Kemp: ...

Thus, the fossil record demonstrates, during the transition from therapsid reptile to mammal, various bones in the skull slowly migrated together to form a second functional jaw joint, and the now-superfluous original jaw bones were reduced in size until they formed the three bones in the mammalian middle ear. The reptilian quadrate bone became the mammalian incus, while the articular bone became the malleus. The entire process had taken nearly the whole length of the Triassic period to complete, a time span of approximately 40 million years. Since the determining characteristic of a mammal in the fossil record is the structure of the jaw bone and joint, all of the therapsids up to the Morganucodonts are classified as reptiles, and all those after that are considered to be mammals. As Romer puts it, "We arbitrarily group the therapsids as reptiles (we have to draw a line somewhere) but were they alive, a typical therapsid probably would seem to us an odd cross between a lizard and a dog, a transitional type between the two great groups of backboned animals." (Romer, 1967, p. 227)
As noted, there are many intermediate stages in this transition from reptile to mammal, each of them intermediate in form between the older and the younger forms, and each of them developing through changes in hereditary traits in their populations from generation to generation.

You can also see many of these forms and their transitional stages on Therapsida: Overview with links to before and after stages.
Those links, particularly the last one, let you look at charts and images of the fossils involved, and you can go the their home page and find contact information so you can talk to actual scientists involved in studying these fossils, if that is what you need to do eh?

Quote
Please do not point me to man-made charts/animated senarios. I am interested in the actual evidence.
Then you will have to travel to museums and universities where the fossils are kept, and get access to the fossils (probably by becoming a grad student in paleontology or taxonomy or similar, to get credentials) and put your hands on the actual fossils and do the same kind of measurement after measurement after measurement that paleontologist and taxonomists do, so that you can compare the traits from fossil to fossil, from age to age.

Certainly the best you can reasonably expect on a web-blog or forum is pictures of fossils, "man-made charts" and quotes from scientific articles. Again, you may need to sign up and pay a fee to obtain access to scientific articles that talk first hand about things like this bat fossil if that is what you want.

If you want to look at pictures of fossils that form a lineage of transition from an early organism to a modern one, there are other transitions we can look at, even among the mammals. For instance we can look at the horse ancestors and their various intermediate stages from dog like animal to the modern horse we know today.

We can start with eohippus/hyracotherium:

[Linked Image]

Compare it to modern dog

[Linked Image]

And then compare it to modern horse

[Linked Image]

And then to each of the fossils known from the fossil record between eohippus and modern horse

[Linked Image]

Let me know if this is what you want to do and we will step through each fossil from eohippus to modern horse and see if you can point out where the evolution from one stage to the next exceeds the variation we see in dogs - the variation we know is possible within a species - or whether every stage is explained by the change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation.

Quote
... as we clearly see the same to this day with animals and variations within the same kind.
So the eohippus stays in the eohippus kind? Does that kind include dogs? Or does the horse kind include dog like omnivores that hunt in packs?

Are all mammals part of the reptile kind? What is a kind? All organisms reproduce "after their kind," that does not make them distinct forms of organisms, nor does it make their species special, it's just how nature works.

Does "kind" really mean anything different from variety, type, sort, group - a generic term?

Quote
... let alone the millions of others.
And yet I believe each post I have made, including this one, on this thread has introduced one set of many instances of intermediate varieties on a transitional sequence, many of them number in the hundreds, some in the thousands and some numbering in the millions.

So if you are going to take the stance that these are not intermediate varieties then you are going to have to go back and read the information on each one and then detail why it is not an intermediate variety. Just denial won't work: detail why the traits are not changing along an overall trend as you progress in age from ancient to modern.

Enjoy.

Last edited by RAZD; 09/21/08 09:46 PM. Reason: generic kind