if evolution is true?

Question

why arent they millions upon millions of skeletal remains of every step between one species and all the other species that we now see today? there should be a clear map from one ancient being to its modern counterpart and there should be enough of these skeletal "maps" to display one in every school in the country. why is it that all we see are fragments and incomplete skeletons most of the time?

as rare as fossilization is, billions of species over millions of years should produce a fair amount of workable remains.

wow, i am familiar with the concept of a jigsaw. therefore your point becomes relatable and therefore valid. actually the situation seems more like a blank puzzle with rounded common edges in which, once you put the whole thing together, you can draw whatever picture on it you like and it will work.

Answer 1

Simple.

Fossilization is *exceedingly* rare.

Please read ANYTHING on how fossils are formed. (See sources.) We are lucky to have any fossils at all.

That said, the skeletal "maps" for many species (horses, whales, dolphins, elephants, rabbits, hares, pigs, deers) are extremely rich and complete. The fossil record for humans, for example, is much more extensive than it is for chimps. Why? Because humans evolved in a drier plain environment which was more conducive to fossilization, while chimps evolved in forest environments less conducive to fossilization.

But you should also understand something: Even if NOT A SINGLE FOSSIL HAD EVER BEEN FOUND, THE EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION IN GENETICS AND DNA *ALONE* IS OVERWHELMING. The specific similarities in genes, and in the molecule-by-molecule differences in DNA between species, shows a clear pattern of common descent wherever we look. It's not just that two species A and B are similar ... but A is closer to B than it is to C ... but also that an insulin molecule in A and B has a certain sequence of atoms that is the same, but this specific sequence is different in C.

----

(P.S. to your additional details.) No, you missed the point. Fossilization is *so* rare, that even with billions of organisms, the number of resulting fossils will be relatively small.

As for the jigsaw puzzle analogy ... don't forget that paleontologists are professional jigsaw-puzzle assemblers. They live, eat, and breathe fossils 8 hours a day, for decades. When they say a jawbone fragment is that of a female youth rather than a mature adult male, or that it is a different species that this other femur found nearby, these aren't just blind guesses. They list 10 to 30 educated reasons why they believe this, and 1000 other paleontologists (who also live, eat, and breathe fossils) get to pick it apart. By the time they all come to the same consensus, this is far more than a guess.

Can one or two paleontologists be mistaken about a certain specimen? Sure. Can a dozen paleontologists be mistaken about a hundred fossils? Less likely. Can an entire community of thousands of paleontologists be mistaken about the entire body of hundreds of thousands of fossils, that their common belief in evolution itself is wrong? Not very likely at all.

Answer 2

If you dig up the grave of someone who's been buried for only a few dozen or hundred years you'll probably only find scattered remains - and these are from people who were carefully burried.

Historically dead bodies were just dumped where they'd be mauled by animals and the remains scattered far and wide.

Even so, there is a very extensive record showing the evolution of animals and mankind. It's a bit like putting together the peices of a jigsaw - only a very complicated one. Several pieces are already in place, some pieces we have but haven't fitted them in yet and some pieces are currently missing. These missing peices are being found from time to time and eventually the jigsaw will be more or less complete.

If you had a jigsaw with some pieces missing you'd still be able to get a pretty good idea of the overall picture, it's just that some of the finer details would be missing. That's how it is with evolution.

Going back a long, long time we have to rely on the fossil records and here it gets even harder. Fossilization of bone requires the correct conditions and this is unusual. Over thousands or millions of years erosion, flooding, plant growth, animals etc disturb the ground and even if a bone moved 1cm a year over a million years it would travel 6 miles from it's original location. Over a billion years it could travel half way round the world.

Answer 3

well, your bones can decay, like a rock, they are erroded, if not perserved right. and evelution is not real, well, to a level, animals only evolve to adapt to their climate, and evolve very little.they dont eveolve from the simplest bacterium to the most complicated and safisticated human beings.. now, if you beleive we evolved from monkeys, well, why didn't all monkeys evolve? there are still a lot of them, and do we actually haveenough skeletal remains to put side to side and watch it evolve as we walk down the line of skeletons? no. of course not, because evelution is not real. we have different species, not "evelutoinal maps" in fine enough detail. AND THIS! this disproves almost all evelutional theroies. These scientists found the best fossil remains ever. a dinosoar that STILL had some LIVING blood cells in the bones, AND it was aged to be only 10,000 years old!!! they also could find out a lot about the dinosoar, they found what kind it is, duh, and that it was a female, and it was pregnant.

Answer 4

I think you have been told enough now to know that fossils are only one of the pillars supporting evolutionary theory. What has not been mentioned here so far is that before the great synthesis of the 30's and 40's paleontologists were not quite on board with evolution by natural selection; at least a significant group. It was the geneticist ( even before the elucidation of DNA ) and the evolutionary biologist who brought all of biology, genetics and paleontology to the " same page ". So, when secretsause says that without ONE fossil, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence in support of evolutionary theory, he is absolutely correct.

Answer 5

Take the carcass of the next chicken you eat and put it out in the back yard and see how long it lasts. Think about the birds that die in your front yard, why aren't the bodies stacked up? Rot, microbes, floods, dehydration.
Preserving remains typically requires that they fall in oxygen free environment (tar, clay, still mud) and stay there while more mud, etc., builds up over them. Then the mud is compressed to rock which may be fractured, bent, eroded, etc. The bones that survive all this have to be found near the surface (because we don't go digging at random) not hundreds or thousands of feet underground, usually during a relatively brief time before they are destroyed by being eroded and tumbled down water ways.
It is closer to amazing that we find any other them.

Answer 6

for something to be fossilized is very unlikely. there will be differences in the soil that do not allow some of the bone to fossilize. Also none of the soft tissues fossilize. Then there has to be a place where these bones are pushed to the surface. all in all fossilizes are very rare

Answer 7

because the other fragments is decayed due to passage of time

Answer 8

NO
of course NOT
NO WAY
Absulotely not

Have i got my point through?