"How much water"...?
You may find 10 or a hundred highly fragmentary fossils that can be made to look more like one or another.
No you can't. Calling the fossil sequences "made to look more like one or another", as if any fossil can be force-fit into any arbitrary hypothetical transitional sequence, is a gross misrepresentation of the high degree of match actually found in the fossils, and a disgusting slur on paleontologists.
But paradoxically, a longer chain creates a bigger problem:
Ah, yes, the old "the better the evidence, the worse the case is for evolution" ploy...
If you can get 100 steps in sequence from one to the other to happen, why doesn't step one happen 100 times over the same period? And step two 99 times.
For the same reason that if you play a 100 hands of poker in a night, you don't get the same hands dealt twice.
That would scatter intermediates all over the spectrum all over time.
It would if your premise were correct, but...
Apparently it isn't that easy to happen.
Only in the sense that it "isn't that easy" to get a *particular* set of hands dealt in poker. And yet, it's not hard to shuffle and deal the cards.
And if it isn't that easy, how do you get 100 of them until the mammals we happen to have today are perfectly adapted to earth and water?
The same way you can get 100 hands of poker in a night -- one after another.
Is today some special time in history?
No.
Why didn't the transitions die out before reproducing?
Some do.
Why are there then so many of them that just happen to turn up?
Because they existed, and left fossil records of their existence.
There is a lot of wishful thinking in the bone chips that are so elegantly reconstructed to "show" evolution.
Actually, "there is a lot of wishful thinking" in the hand-wavings of people who want to deny the clear indications of the evidence.
Does this look like "bone chips" to you?
