Missing Link Found

One of the weakest arguments that creationists frequently mount against evolutionary theory -that the so-called "missing link" has never been found - just got a bit weaker. I say that it is weak because anyone with a little bit of knowledge about how evolution works knows that there is not one big missing link, but several missing pieces of a complex (but not irreducibly so) and dynamic puzzle.

I say that it just got weaker because the journal Nature is reporting this month that scientists from Harvard, University of Chicago and the Philadelphia Academy of the Sciences have recovered two sets of fossils dating to the Devonian - 383 million years ago - that fill the gap between land and sea animals. The creature, which the researchers have dubbed tiktaalik rosae , was able to breathe air and within 17 million years, animals with four fully developed limbs had come into being. Check out this synopsis in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, or listen to the nature podcast.