90 years later, there are still no transitional fossils

Darwin, Charles R.

• "He who rejects this view of the imperfection of the geological record, will rightly reject the whole theory. For he may ask in vain where are the numberless transitional links which must formerly have connected the closely allied or representative species found in the successive stages of the same great formation?"

Hitching, Francis

• "The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps; the fossils are missing in all the important places."

Woodroff, D.S.

• "But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition."

Ridley, Mark

• "In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation."

Gould, Stephen J.

• "The fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy. Nothing distressed him more than the Cambrian explosion, the coincident appearance of almost all complex organic designs..."

Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I.

• "The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life's history not the artifact of a poor fossil record. The fossil record flatly fails to substantiate this expectation of finely graded change."

Gould, Stephen J

• "All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt. Gradualists usually extract themselves from this dilemma by invoking the extreme imperfection of the fossil record."

Eldredge, Niles

• "There are all sorts of gaps: absence of gradationally intermediate 'transitional' forms between species, but also between larger groups - between, say, families of carnivores, or the orders of mammals. In fact, the higher up the Linnaean hierarchy you look, the fewer transitional forms there seem to be."

Gould, Stephen J.

• "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution."

Simpson, George Gaylord

• "In spite of these examples, it remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all new categories above the level of families, appear in the record suddenly and are not led up to by known, gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences."

Brouwer, A.

• "One of the most surprising negative results of paleontological research in the last century is that such transitional forms seem to be inordinately scarce. In Darwin's time this could perhaps be ascribed with some justification to the incompleteness of the paleontological record and to lack of knowledge, but with the enormous number of fossil species which have been discovered since then, other causes must be found for the almost complete absence of transitional forms."

Dawkins, Richard

• "It is as though they [fossils] were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists. ...Both schools of thought (Punctuationists and Gradualists) despise so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil record. The only alternative explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types in the Cambrian era is divine creation and (we) both reject this alternative."