The fossil record doesn't show intermediate changes along a linear path. It doesn't show "A gave rise to B, which gave rise to C, which gave rise to D...etc." It shows "Well, here's fossil A...And here's fossil D...but there's no record of B and C." Paleontologists take great leaps in connecting the dots. The reason these intermediate forms are called the "missing link" is because they're missing. Gould tries to explain this missing data away, without bringing evolution itself into question. He starts by saying, "OK, evolution is true...so how do I explain the missing data in the fossil record?" If his premise ("evolution is true") is wrong, his explanation is wrong. But he doesn't allow for premise to be wrong.
Why not let some of the experts help you out:
The Fossils In General
"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing'
evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the
most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record.
Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does
not provide them ..."
David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum
Evolution, vol 28, Sep 1974, p 467
"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps;
the fossils are missing in all the important places."
Francis Hitching
The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong
Penguin Books, 1982, p.19
"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major
transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our
imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been
a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."
Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Is a new general theory of evolution emerging?"
Paleobiology, vol 6, January 1980, p. 127
"...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when
they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line,
there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight
argument."
Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London
As quoted by: L. D. Sunderland
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 89
"We do not have any available fossil group which can categorically be
claimed to be the ancestor of any other group. We do not have in the fossil
record any specific point of divergence of one life form for another, and
generally each of the major life groups has retained its fundamental
structural and physiological characteristics throughout its life history
and has been conservative in habitat."
G. S. Carter, Professor & author
Fellow of Corpus Christi College
Cambridge, England
Structure and Habit in Vertebrate Evolution
University of Washington Press, 1967
"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with
gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during
their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the
same as when they disappear ... 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a
species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its
ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'."
Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
Natural History, 86(5):13, 1977
"But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed,
why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the
earth?" (p. 206)
"Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such
intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely
graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest
objection which can be urged against my theory (of evolution)." (p. 292)
Charles Robert Darwin
The Origin of Species, 1st edition reprint
Avenel Books, 1979
The Abundance of Fossils
"Darwin... was embarrassed by the fossil record... we are now about
120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been
greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the
situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still
surprisingly jerky and, ironically, ... some of the classic cases of
Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse
in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more
detailed information."
David M. Raup, Curator of Geology
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology"
Field Museum of Natural History
Vol. 50, No. 1, (Jan, 1979), p. 25
"Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological
exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely
more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been
discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are
filled with over 100-million fossils of 250,000 different species. The
availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit
objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What
is the picture which the fossils have given us? ... The gaps between major
groups of organisms have been growing even wide and more undeniable. They
can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection
of the fossil record."
Luther D. Sunderland (Creationist)
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems,
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 9