“So that the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great. But assuredly, if this theory be true, such have lived upon the earth.” ?Why then is not every geological formation and every strata full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory.? Darwin. Origin, Chapter Ten: On the Absence of intermediate varieties at the present day; On the nature of extinct intermediate varieties; On the lapse of time, as inferred from the rate of denudation and deposition.
“The evidence we find in the geologic record is not nearly as compatible with darwnian natural selection as we would like it to be. Darwin was completely aware of this. He was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn’t look the way he predicted it would and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his Origin of Species to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences. . . . Darwin’s general solution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence and his theory was to say that the fossil record is a very incomplete one. . . . Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information ? what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated” D.M. Raup, Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 50 (1979): 22
“It is considered likely that all the animal phyla became distinct before or during the Cambrian, for they all appear fully formed, without intermediates connecting one form to another.” Douglas Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 2nd ed. (Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates, Inc., 1986), p. 325
“Each of the phyla that developed durably skeletonized lineages during this period did so independently, suggesting that the opportunities for epifaunal life were open to a wide array of adaptive types. Furthermore, many of the durably skeletonized phyla appearing in Cambrian rocks are represented by a number of distinctrive subgroups, classes, or orders, that appear suddenly without known intermediates.” J.W. Valentine, “The Evolution of Complex Animals,” in What Darwin Began, ed. Laurie Godfrey (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1985), p. 267.
“The sudden appearance of diverse metazoan skeletal fossils heralds the beginning of the Phanerozoic [the Phanerozoic Age includes all of the fossil record from the Cambrian to the present] . . . there is little evidence that the capacity to form skeletons was acquired gradually or over a prolonged period. . . . A wide variety of skeleton types and most of the major marine invertebrate clades appear suddenly in the fossil record. . . . The ecological diversification of animals is equally dramatic. A wide variety of habitats were occupied by these biotas, from shallow to deep benthos and to the pelagic realm” J.H. Lipps and P. W. Signor, eds., Origin and Early Evolution of the Metazoa (New York: Plenum Press, 1992), pp. 7-8.
“If any event in life’s history resembles man’s creation myths, it is this sudden diversification of marine life when multicellular organisms took over as the dominant actors in ecology and evolution. Baffling (and embarrassing) to Darwin, this event still dazzles us and stands as a major biological revolution on a par with the invention of self-replication and the origin of the eukariotic cell. The animal phyla emerged out of the Precambrian mists with most of the attributes of their modern descendants.” Stefan Bengtson, Nature 345 (1990): 765.
“All three subdivisions of the bony fishes appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time. They are already widely divergent morphologically, and they are heavily armored. How did they originate? What allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they all come to have heavy armor? And why is there no trace of earlier intermediate forms?” G.T. Todd, American Zoology 20 (4, 1980): 757.
“Reconstructing the ancestry of a clan like the pterodactyls remains an especially difficult challenge. Flying dragons seem to burst into the world like Athena from the mind of Zeus, fully formed. Even the earliest skeletons of pterodactyls already display fully developed wings and the specialized torso and hips so characteristic of the entire order. . . . As of today, no fossils have been discovered to show how the pterodactyl’s forelimbs became transformed into wings.” Robert T. Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies (New York: Zebra Books, Kensington Publishing Corp., 1986) pp. 296?297.
“Archaeopteryx probably cannot tell us much about the early origins of feathers and flight in true protobirds because Archaeopteryx was, in a modern sense, a bird.” Alan Feduccia, Science 259 (1993): 792.
“the processes underlying evolutionary innovation are remarkably poorly understood, which leaves us at a surprising conundrum: while biologists have made great progress over the past century and a half in understanding how existing traits diversify, we have made relatively little progress in understanding how novel traits come into being in the first place.” “The origin of novel features continues to be a fascinating and challenging topic in evolutionary biology.”-- Moczek, Armin P. May 2008. On the origins of novelty in development and evolution. BioEssays, Vol. 30, Issue 5, pp. 409-512.
“There is a striking lack of correspondence between genetic and evolutionary change. Neo-Darwinian theory predicts a steady, slow continuous, accumulation of mutations (microevolution) that produces a progressive change in morphology leading to new species, genera, and so on (macroevolution). But macroevolution now appears to be full of discontinuities (punctuated evolution), so we have a mismatch of some importance. That is, the fossil record shows mostly stasis, or lack of change, in a species for many millions of years; there is no evidence there for gradual change even though, in theory, there must be a gradual accumulation of mutations at the micro level.” Richard C. Strohman. March 1997. The coming Kuhnian revolution in biology. Nature Biotechnology, Vol. 15, pp. 194-200.