@sonichell,
Im an earth scientist who actually uses many transitional form fossils in my daily work to locate O/G units. Specific fossils of things like conodonts, foraminiferans and gastropods are "tools" for modern oil exploration.
One of my favorite fossil transitional forms is
Tiktaalik Rosaea
>Its found in the units of the Devonian below where amphibians are found, and they re found in the same unit which is ABOVE the layers that contain earlier lobe-finned fish
Eustenopteron . Here we have an earlier fish species with features showing a trend toward becoming a lnd dweller, Then we have Tiktaalik, just above , in the later mid Devonian. Tiktaalik shows a great advance to "amphibian state. It had "a hand-like " array of bones on its fore and rear fins that enabled it to "walk on the stream bottom. It hd a large head tht was gearing to eyes that were more atop the skull and aNECK so that it could actually move its head about. It had a skull more like n amphibian . It had a set of vomerine teeth like amphibians but it was a fish. Lying above the Tiktaalik layer of Devoian middle units lie fossils of
Icthyoostegans which are true amphibians, yet stil retaining the Tiktalik -like skull.
The neat thing about these transitional forms wre where they were found and how the geologists went out hunting for them.
The two geologists that went looking , picked out thir field sites based upon the known geology. They needed to be in fluvial deposists of stream seiments from the mid-Devonian.
The reason was that the last fish fossils they had were from lower Devonian and were found in various deposists of that age. The amphibians cam from the upper MIDDLE Devonian. SO the fossil hunters , if they were right, should find the TRANSITIONAL fossil in the sediments of thelower or middle MIDDLE DEVONIAN. SO they chose Ellsmere Island to hunt.
Three years later. they hit their find and the scientific world has been appraised of this transitional form by the two scientists who found it.
(They are Drs Neil Shubin and Ted Daeschler).
Quote: Similarities between different species is not proof of evolution
We don't hunt for "proof". We hunt for evidence nd we conclude.
If we find three fossils from 3 different sequential geologic times, each showing a "stairway" feature that gets preserved in the third (UPPER) level fossil. Its hard to deny the evidence for a close heritable relationship among these fossils.
Evolution (BTW) is NOT a strait line event where we see only lockstep forms that go from A to (N) in form. We usually find all sorts of crazy variants of forms that each may have one or two traits that get transferred on to later generations . Some forms live but most go extinct. Heritability of traits that confer a heritable advantage for successful living within any specific environment will be selected FOR, and the rest go extinct. Something like dinosaurs and mammals evolved from early forms beginning in the Permian. The dinosaurs, continued to evolve and be the "pinnacle species" until they disappeared. They left their ossils and parent/daughter forms throughout the Triassic/Jurssic and Cretceous. Several forms of the "ceratopsian" herbivores can be seen to show really good transitional forms from all the thousands of fossils of these dinosaurs. (I think a visit to the "Treatise on Vertebrate Paleontology" would knock your socks off (IF) you truly have an open inquisitive mind. If Not, If you are merely looking at trying to support a belief in some other explanation (Ill not discuss it here), then, Id suggest that you don't bother because you will deny what the data and evidence shows.
