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Shawn Gould, ©National Geographic SocietyIt was just a month ago that the world's media outlets fell over themselves proclaiming the fossil findings of a half-fish - half vertebrate as the Missing Link -the Smoking Gun of fossil evidence that finally starts to fill in those notorious "gaps" in the fossil evidence so gleefully pounced on by creationists and intelligent designists.
For the most part, the scientific community is far more reticent about the Missing Link claim for the
Tiktaalik - the name given to the species whose fossils were discovered on Ellesmere Island - preferring the more sobering "transitional" (See
Newfound Fossil Is Transitional between Fish and Landlubbers at Scientific American News.)
How could the media resist - Tiktaalik is already a star, with a
wikipedia page, and its own
web site at the University of Chicago?
While the
Tiktaalik find does provide a tantalizing clue on how and when the fish/tetrapod transition occurred, it is always true that plugging a gap introduces two more gaps between the existing fossils and the "Missing Link." Is it a shock then that creationists and ID'ers aren't impressed? Doubling the gaps will always work to their advantage.
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