What is the difference between a Transitional Fossil and a Fossil?

Question

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Answer 1

All fossils, and all organisms, are transitional.

The thing about present day organisms is that no one knows what they are transitional towards - we only know (partially) about their antecedents.

Answer 2

It depends on the fossil. Some fossils have characteristics that imply a transitional state. Fully human fossils have been documented so they can't be seen as "transitional". As have many, many other samples. This is R&S. Earth Sciences is the better option. Try that instead. Chances are you'll be forwarded to a creationist /religious propoganda website here, like answeringenesis.com or other laughable sites.

Answer 3

A fossil is something that is dug up. A transitional fossil is something invented by creationists who wish to delude.

All forms of life are transitional, except for the very first and the last of a species which leaves no descendants. For example the thylacine or the dodo. I could be wrong but I doubt that there is a formal scientific definition of a transitional form. If something is undefined, then it is easy to argue pointlessly and at length about it.

Answer 4

First of all I can't tell if this post is a joke or not... Evolution does NOT claim (or anywhere close) that bumblebees turned into humpback whales, or anything else that you said, OR that humans evolved from primates. It also does not claim that there wasn't an original "creator," although that is beyond the limits of science (and perhaps human intelligence) to explain. Evolution is the process by which things evolve. For example, let's say that a frog had a random mutation in their genes that caused them to be born with spotted skin. The spotted frog would be able to camouflage itself more effectively, thus surviving for longer and passing on its genes to future generations. These future generations would be born with spotted skin, and more and more frogs would be born with spotted skin and survive longer than other frogs, until eventually, after many many thousands of years, all those without spotted skin had died out. This process of "natural selection" has nothing to do with who or what created the frog in the first place. Pigs are not able to fly because flying is not helpful to a pig's survival -- nor a human's.

Answer 5

All fossils are 'transitional' fossils.

Organisms DO NOT 'evolve'. The 'gene pool' evolves... constantly. Organisms are essentially the 'proxies' for altered DNA, playing out the 'game' of survival/procreation in 'meat space'. DNA whose proxy organisms manage to procreate get to move on to the next round... kind of like Jeopardy.

A fossil is essentially a (very) low-resolution meat-space snapshot of the current state of the gene pool of a particular population of organisms at a given space/time coordinate.
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Answer 6

Transitional fossil referrs to one that may show evidence of transition between species...
BTW, there are NONE in the fossil record,,,,.and this is evidence against evolution theory and evidence FOR the Genesis account...which says alll things were created "after their kind".

Only a laymen evolutionist would make the foolish statement that there ARE transitional fossils ....according to the most well known evolutionists NOT ONE has been found in the fossil record...

Answer 7

whirlingmerc, you don't look very hard do you, all those transitional forms have been found years ago.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7004727.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2036458.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1858574.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4337888.stm

Why is it that Creationists seem to think science stopped in 1920?

Rev Einstein, didn't you know the Genesis story is an old Sumerian (way before the bible) polytheistic fable about an argument between the gods?
And Stephen Gould was out there, pretty much on his own. Maynard Smith wrote that Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."
And Colin Patterson's quote is taken out of context, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html

But don't let me disturb your cozy little world :)

Answer 8

Methinx you picked not just the wrong section but the wrong wording entirely.

Answer 9

transitional fossils don't exist

Answer 10

there are no transitional fossils, you would need to see the following for reptiles to birds:

for example... a reptile has a bellows type lung... a bird a complex lung which passes air one way like a jet engine... what fossil is in between a bellows and a jet engine style... none

a t rexx has a lizard hip... birds have a bird hip... what is in between

a bird has feathers that are like two dimentional velcro that a free in one direction and lock in the other... lizards have scales.. what is in between

in reality animal types appear in the geological column fully formed and without clear predessessors and in fact the C14 is roughly constant accross the column. It is more plausible the column was laid down at once catastrophically in the flood of Noah and animals sorted hydrologically or as they could crawl to higher ground