If you’re tired of arguing with people who don’t understand evolution, here’s the ammunition you need.
"The fossil record is incomplete! Where are the missing links?" ask creationists. Yes, the fossil record is "incomplete". The only way it could be "complete" would be if literally every single living thing had been fossilised after it died. That doesn't happen, because the process of fossilisation is incredibly unlikely, especially for land creatures.
Ghedoghedo / Wikimedia Commons / Via simple.wikipedia.org
But given how unlikely it is, the fossil record is amazingly good. Take any species of large vertebrate alive at the moment, and there's a good chance there will be fossils which could be its ancestor. In some cases there are lots.
For instance: Whales. We know whales are descended from land mammals. But for a long time, it wasn't clear which. Darwin thought their ancestors might be something like a bear; later evidence suggested it's probably a relative of cows and hippopotamuses. But there wasn't a fossil of a whale-ancestor on the brink of becoming aquatic.
And then, in 1994, a skeleton was found in Pakistan, of a 50-million-year-old animal which is now known as Ambulocetus natans. It's an ancestor of whales, but it has small hooves: It lived a largely but not exclusively aquatic life, like that of modern seals.
Aetiocetus. Nobu Tamura / Wikimedia Commons / Via en.wikipedia.org
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