Archaeopteryx is listed as a transitional fossil on a University of Ill. website. Archaeopteryx was determined to be an extinct bird by Stephen Jay Gould and a sinificant portion of the scientific community some time ago!
The rest of the fossils are explained with verbiage like "may" or "probably".
The quotes I liked best were "traces are so fragmentary that actual ancestors can't be identified" and "few or none of the speciation events are present."
Again, please provide direct and accepted evidence of vertical evolution from the fossil record.
You of course have no reference for this assertion.
Scientists like to classify things. Long before Stephen Jay Gould, it was decided that a bird was "a vertenrate animal with feathers".
By this definition Archaeopteryx was a bird. this does not mean it was not transitional.
And now it seems that some dinosaurs are also birds, by the definition. This is only a problem for Creationists who still class Dinosaurs as Reptiles.
Yes
"Archaeopteryx is listed as a transitional fossil on a University of Ill. website. Archaeopteryx was determined to be an extinct bird by Stephen Jay Gould and a sinificant portion of the scientific community some time ago!"
No, it was classified as a bird because Linnaeus did not make a separate classification for transitional fossils. Because of this, Archy had to be classified as either a bird or a reptile.
Gould and the rest of science have considered Archy a transitional for a long time.
Gould did believe that Archaeopteryx was a transitional form. See:
Gould, S. J. 1980. "The Tell-tale Wishbone" in The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History, pp 267-277. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (Originally published in the November, 1977 edition of Natural History)
" The rest of the fossils are explained with verbiage like "may" or "probably"."
Many disciplines other than math and some physics use that terminology in their theories to signify the possibility of correction or falsification. It takes nothing away from the significance of the hypotheses within the theory or the evidence.
"The quotes I liked best were "traces are so fragmentary that actual ancestors can't be identified" and "few or none of the speciation events are present.""
And these statements about one collection of fossils means that all fossils are in this situation? You are using your selective vision extremely well to see only those passages. Or is it your habit to cherry pick?
" Again, please provide direct and accepted evidence of vertical evolution from the fossil record."
Go to http://www.talkorigins.org/ and look around for a while. You might be surprised at what you find.