Page 104 - Confessions of the Evolutionists

102 CONFESSIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONISTS

an entirely new cast, a cast in which the dinosaurs do not appear at all,
other reptiles are supernumeraries, and all the leading parts are played by
mammals of sorts barely hinted at in the preceding acts. 261
This is true of all thirty-two orders of mammals... The earliest and most
primitive known members of every order [of mammals] already have the
basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous
sequence from one order to another known. In most cases, the break is so
sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and
much disputed... This regular absence of transitional forms is not con-
fined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long
been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all classes of animals,
both vertebrate and invertebrate... it is true of the classes, and of the ma-
jor animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of
plants. 262

Eric Lombard is professor of organismal biology and anatomy at
the University of Chicago:
Those searching for specific information useful in constructing phyloge-
nies of mammalian taxa will be disappointed. 263
Tom S. Kemp is a curator of the Zoological Collections at the
University of Oxford:
Each species of mammal-like reptile that has been found appears sud-
denly in the fossil record and is not preceded by the species that is direct-
ly ancestral to it. It disappears some time later, without leaving a directly
descended species. 264
While the great majority of evolutionists are unable to suggest any
explanation for the emergence of mammals, some others have behaved
more outrageously and produced various ridiculous and irrational tales.
One such tale regarding the evolution of reptiles into mammals is de-

scribed in one evolutionist publication:
Some of the reptiles in the colder regions began to develop a method of
keeping their bodies warm. Their heat output increased when it was cold
and their heat loss was cut down when scales became smaller and more
pointed, and evolved into fur. Sweating was also an adaptation to regu-
late the body temperature, a device to cool the body when necessary by