Yes well luckily for us there are a whole host of skeletal features peculiar to mammals that allow us to determine whether a fossil was mammalian or not. The fact that these features are not only confined to, but are found in all living mammal species and all recent fossil mammal species makes it a statistical certainty that older fossil species possessing them were mammalian. If you don’t want to make the obvious inference, suit yourself. If we followed your refusal to make any historical inferences based on present day certainties, sciences like geology, cosmology, archaeology and palaeobiology would not exist. Doctors would be pretty snowed under if they couldn’t use a list of symptoms to make a diagnosis, but instead had to start afresh with each patient. “T,U, V, W, X, Y and Z are characteristic symptoms of disease A, and only disease A. We’re statistically certain that the illness is in fact disease A, but we cannot meet the absolute ironclad mathematical proofs required by the creationists, so we won’t make the diagnosis. Instead, we’ll waste time speculating that it might in fact be some disease we’ve never heard of.”
Yes well luckily for us there are a whole host of skeletal features peculiar to mammals that allow us to determine whether a fossil was mammalian or not.
False. Actually Natural History Museum gives as the characteristics of mammals: milk production, hair or fur, warm bloodedness, and live birth. None of these can be normally determined from fossils. In addition if we did not have live specimens we would not know that the above definition is false. The platypus is a mammal and produces milk and has mammary glands but it lays eggs. So no, fossils cannot give us evidence that an animal is a mammal. While it may be true that all mammals living have three earbones and this can be found in fossils, there is no NECESSARY CONNECTION between it and mammary glands. Further, such a feature cannot show us how the various unique features of mammals developed in a gradual manner as evolution postulates. So basically your post is totally false and just a bunch of rhetorical nonsense.