No, but let dohh see if he can answer.
Whose dohh?
Aside from those who specialize in them, who cares about any specific beastie? The evidence for evolution does not rest on specific beasties, it rests of the relations of the overall morphological patterns we see in successively dated geological layers--with particular regards to increases in general complexity.
I don't know if tests have been made to find out whether the two subspecies at the end of the ring could be fertilized with each other
If they have been they aren't widely known.
The Herring Gull is divided into breeds with a pattern of continuity that makes it obvious which direction around the earth it has been slowly migrating its nesting grounds. Every breed that's adjacent can interbreed--until you get to the end of the migration sequence, somewhere in Siberia, as I remember. As this point, the two adjacent breeds, taken, from the assumed direction of migration to be the oldest and newest, cannot interbreed.
I don't know if this is what y'all are talking about, but the Herring Gull's breeding pattern is kind of famous in biological science circles.
Sorry about the typo. For BMCDA's sake -- Palentologist O.C. Marsh found the apatosaurus bones in 1877. Two years later he found a second set of bones which he declared to belong to a new species "brontosaurus." The set was missing a skull which he took from a site a few miles away, hence the belief he had a new species. It was determined the rest of the skeleton was another apatosaurus. The mistake was rectified in 1975. Because apatosaurus was found ealier, its name was kept -- despite bronto's popularity.
Bronto never existed. The creature it was thought to be was a mixed-matched skelton.
Aside from those who specialize in them, who cares about any specific beastie?
The moral is beware of overenthusiasm concerning the fossil record. Bronto was a rather mild and insignificant mistake -- unlike say Piltdown man. I'll provide a personal dentist-office epiphany. I was reading one of his waiting room magazines - I think it was Scientific American -- which featured an article speculating that phororhacos -- the large flesh-eating South American bird -- had lived in Florida. The evidence provided for this speculation concerned the discovery of bones originally thought to belong to an eohippus. I remember thinking "so much for the fossil record."
Several creation sites claim that the pro-evolution evidence presented by the defense in the Scopes Trial has been found to be completely inaccurate. I can't find any challenges to this claim.
Now, I'm not discounting fossils or claiming they are unworthy of study or that that exotic, extinct prehistoric creatures never existed or that it is even somehow wrong to draw pro-evolution conclusions concerning fossils. I just feel any conclusions should be treated with some skepticism and be made tenuously.
The Herring Gull is divided into breeds with a pattern of continuity that makes it obvious which direction around the earth it has been slowly migrating its nesting grounds. Every breed that's adjacent can interbreed--until you get to the end of the migration sequence, somewhere in Siberia, as I remember. As this point, the two adjacent breeds, taken, from the assumed direction of migration to be the oldest and newest, cannot interbreed.
There are lots of related creatures that can't interbreed -- housecats and tigers, for instance. But at what point does the seed of one species become incapable of fertilizing the egg of another? I got into a rather heated discussion on this matter on another thread and the conclusion seemed to be that a housecat can fertilize a tiger's egg -- albeit artifically and with little hope for a successful birth. I suspect the same would be true with the gulls, although I'd be interested if you have information showing otherwise.