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Lame argument - can’t find any so they are all transitional.

Never heard of stasis in the fossil record, Jim?

How about polystate fossils? Here’s some quotes for you to think about.

“Being a world-renowned fossil expert, Patterson’s frank admissions were embarrassing to adherents of the ‘religion of evolution’—including himself, it would appear. But there were even more devastating revelations to come from Dr Patterson.

During a public lecture presented at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History on 5 November 1981, he dropped a bombshell among his peers that evening, who became very angry and emotional. Here are some extracts from what he said:

‘ … I’m speaking on two subjects, evolutionism and creationism, and I believe it’s true to say that I know nothing whatever about either … One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, well, let’s call it non-evolutionary, was last year I had a sudden realisation.

… One morning I woke up … and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff [evolution] for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it.’ He added:

‘That was quite a shock that one could be misled for so long … I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people: “Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that you think is true?” I tried that question on the geology staff in the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago … and all I got there was silence for a long time, and then eventually one person said: “Yes, I do know one thing. It ought not to be taught in high school.”.’6

Although these are only excerpts from Patterson’s very frank and startling lecture that evening (the full text is even more revealing), it is plain to see the doubts he was having. It also shows that creationist usage of such quotes by Patterson does not amount to ‘creationist foul play’.

Dr Patterson’s penchant for openness did not do him any service with the pro-evolutionary scientific establishment, who often expressed anger and dismay at his comments when they could not make excuses for them. His experience and expertise as holder of one of the most prestigious scientific posts in the world did not grant him immunity from pressure for having dared to express doubts about the evolutionary worldview. It is a sad reminder that political and ideological correctness can be more important than any so-called ‘objective facts’ in determining scientific acceptance of an idea.”

polystrate fossils are fossils which were buried in a geologically short time span either by one large depositional event or by several smaller ones.
Note: polystrate is a creationist term which is used to group together unrelated or poorly related phenom.

An set of examples from Yellowstone are trees consumed by lahars and other volcano related rapid depositions of materials. You can find similar tree fossils in the process of formation near Mt. Saint Helens. The coal mine’s upright trees is even more easily described as coal originated most often from plant decay in a swamp. As successive layers of decaying material surrounded the tree a low oxygen environment preserved the tree as well as other fossils. The tree would naturally be held upright in the midst of the numerous layers of organic material. Bingo, a natural explanation for polystrate trees in coal.

Basically, you look for rapid deposition of rock, mud, etc.(perhaps a landslide or yes, a flood). And you get trees or other things poking up through several strata.

Stasis is merely a period of no perceptible change. Horseshoe crabs or alligators are often used as examples. In fact such is not rare, odd or inexplicable.

Dr. Patterson’s “revaluation” refutes nothing about TOE other than that the good doctor was having a crisis of faith. Actually, the truth is that Dr. Colin Patterson has been repeatedly and falsely quoted. The actual quote was merely:

“”I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. . .I will lay it on the line, There is not one such fossil for which one might make a watertight argument.”
— Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History.”
Dr. Patterson’s book “Evolution” (1978, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.) has the quote from Dr Peterson:
“
In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil ‘missing links’, such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes. . .”

A 1993 letter of Dr. Patterson is, as follows:

Dear Mr Theunissen,
Sorry to have taken so long to answer your letter of July 9th. I was away for a while, and then infernally busy. I seem fated continually to make a fool of myself with creationists. The specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April 1979, is accurate as far as it goes. The passage quoted continues “... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test.”

I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is correct, and the creationists’ is false.

That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous “keynote address” at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the “Systematics Discussion Group” in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on “Evolutionism and creationism”; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else.

I hope that by now I have learned to be more circumspect in dealing with creationists, cryptic or overt. But I still maintain that scepticism is the scientist’s duty, however much the stance may expose us to ridicule.

Yours Sincerely,

[signed]

Colin Patterson

In other words, the creationists’ dishonestly represented Patterson’s position and, made a lot of stuff up. They do that sort of thing a lot.

BrandtMichaels: "Lame argument - can’t find any so they are all transitional."

No, the "lame argument", indeed the insane argument here is the one you people make about "no transitional forms".
In fact, the fossil record is chock full of "transitional forms", and yet you insanely point at each saying, "see, no transitions, no transitions...", and the more "transitions" you're shown, the more you declare "no transitions" because now you need to see the "transitions between the transitions!"

Of course it's insane, but clever as h*ll, because nine out of ten, indeed 99 out of 100 people can't see that, by taking over the terms of debate, you've rigged the argument before it even starts.
Similarly with the alleged distinction between "micro-" versus "macro-" evolution.
In reality, these words describe nothing more than the effects of short-term versus long-term evolution.
But by making it sound as if one can be "observed" while the other not, anti-evolutionists can pretend that "macro-evolution" is just a myth.

In reality, long-term effects, macro-evolution, can be seen in every living thing on Earth, if you're willing to look.

BrandtMichaels quoting someone named 'Patterson': "One morning I woke up … and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff [evolution] for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it."

Obvious hyperbole from the good doctor, said for drama & effect -- certainly not true in any except a metaphysical sense.
The real truth is: science does the best it can with the data it collects, but even under the very best of circumstances, scientific theories, hypotheses, laws etc., are not reality itself, but merely a model of reality, a model which may be more or less accurate, but is still only ever a model.

Reality itself is quite different, and every good scientist knows that.
The good doctor Paterson is simply telling us that science claims no metaphysical certitude about anything it reports on.
So if you believe in a different metaphysical grounding than basic scientific assumptions (i.e., naturalism, uniformitarianism) then Dr. Paterson can't say with absolute certainty that you are wrong and science is right.

Indeed, that most basic of scientific assumptions, known as "methodological naturalism" is far from a religious belief in atheism, rather it's simply a working agreement that we will set aside our prior religious/philosophical/metaphysical beliefs for purposes of whatever scientific project we're working on.

So the good doctor is simply pointing out what science doesn't know, rather than crowing about what it does know.
Nothing wrong with that, it's the way scientists are supposed to view things.