Page 485 - Atlas of Creation Volume 3

Harun Yahya

As a result of these discoveries, evolutionist speculations about Archaeopteryx as the best candidate
for an intermediate form are largely silenced today. Alan Feduccia, an expert ornithologist and professor
from the Biology Department of the University of North Carolina, said that "most recent workers who have
studied various anatomical features of Archaeopteryx have found the creature to be much more birdlike than previ-

ously imagined." Again according to Feduccia, "the resemblance of Archaeopteryx to theropod dinosaurs has
been grossly overestimated." 21 In short, it is now known that there is no vast difference between
Archaeopteryx and other birds.
In the century and a half since Darwin, no intermediate forms have been found. This fact has become

undisputable, especially since the 1970s but it is still ignored by a few paleontologists who espouse the
theory of evolution. Among these paleontologists, the best known are Stephen J. Gould and Niles
Eldredge. These two have proposed a different model of evolution under the name of "punctuated equi-

librium," in which they insist that the fossil record has refuted Darwinism's "gradualism." They have
shown in detail that various genera of living things appeared suddenly in the fossil record and remained
unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.
In a book written with Ian Tattersall, another evolutionist paleontologist, Eldredge made this impor-
tant assessment:

That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the
fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself . . .
prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search. . . One hun-
dred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record
will not confirm this part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record. The fossil

record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.

Another pictorial reconstruction of
Archaeopteryx

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