FALLACY #4 -- THERE ARE "TRANSITIONAL FORMS"

Another claim of evolution is that transitional forms exist. Transitional forms are the "links" that should evolve as one organism supposedly turns into another over eons of time. One of the most well known alleged transitional forms is the archeopteryx. Archeopteryx is the supposed link between dinosaurs and birds. It is said to have had teeth and claws on its forelimbs, as do reptiles like the dinosaurs, but many extinct flying creatures had teeth, and some present-day birds have claws on their wings. Furthermore, its feathers and hollow bones classify it uniquely as a bird.

In fact, the archeopteryx fossils are possible fakes. They are possibly dinosaur fossils with feather impressions deliberately etched into the rock. But even if genuine, they are certainly no evidence of a transition between dinosaurs and birds. There are modern creatures having the same characteristics possessed by the archeopteryx. For example, the hoatzin (pronounced "watson"), a bird native to Central and South America, has claws on its forelimbs.

Another evolutionary claim of transition is the alleged development of the horse. The horse is supposed to have evolved from the small eohippus ("dawn horse") over sixty million years into the large modern equus, the large modern horse. Supposedly the horse changed from a small and primitive animal, to one that is large and advanced. However, eohippus was not a horse at all but an extinct variety of hyrax, a small rabbit-size animal. So much like a hyrax was eohippus, in fact, that it is no longer called eohippus, but hyracotherium ("hyrax-like animal").

Furthermore, the entire sequence of animals supposedly leading to the modern horse has been found upside down in the fossil record, and in other places mixed up (see Note 8). None of these animals, therefore, can be transitional forms leading to any other. In the fossil record these animals are often found in random order. This find is in keeping with the idea that all living things have co-existed since the Creation Week and were actually buried at the same time in the fossil record during the Flood.

It is often claimed that embryonic growth retraces the evolutionary history of an organism. The branchial arches in a human embryo, for example, are often claimed to be "gill slits" that are left over from the "fish stage" of our evolution. A closer examination of the fate of these so-called gill-slits shows that they actually become part of the face, not the respiratory system (see Note 9). They do not show that man evolved from fish or other water dwellers.