Ambulocetus has a pelvis. It was found in 1998 after an interruption in excavations at the original site as has already been explained here. What is the point of dredging up quotes from out-of-date papers if not to mislead people about the current state of the evidence?
We have nearly complete skeletons on Paki and Ambu now. Anyone reading the AiG site would still think otherwise. The proof is they show up on this forum all the time thinking otherwise and linking AiG.
So, back to the larger progression, Sarfati attacks each piece as if it were the only fossil in the world and makes no sense, ignoring that it is one bead on a chain and there's a warehouse full of chained beads. Sarfati still denies the existence of necklaces by breaking the wire and losing the beads.
Science changed its story (the reconstruction) about Pakicetus as new bones were found. Sarfati looks smug and says "Tah-dah!" One bead gone.
Sarfati waves quotes that say, "No pelvis." "Tah-Dah!" Two beads gone.
Basilosaurus is ten times longer than Ambulocetus. [But Sarfati skips the truly intermediate Kutchicetus and Dorudon.] The transition is not as smooth as presented by the evolutionists. [Not if you skip two stages.] "Tah-Dah!"
So, backing up, there is a chain of fossils with similar teeth and similar ear bones and similar other features that seem to show a true land mammal "kind" morphing into a true marine mammal "kind." Nostrils migrate back to become a blowhole. Legs disappear. For all that, the relationship remains visible and the stages appear in the right order.
Evolution predicted this before it was true. Pretty uncanny. Creation denied it after it was true. You could argue about which is harder, but the first is very hard to explain if evolution is not a theory with useful predictive power.
So, backing up futher in the discussion, we have the question of whether "common designer" makes as much sense as "common descent." And I said that God filled the sea with fish, but then, to make a thing which superficially looks very fish-like, He used mammal parts. Then he put fossils in the ground that look like land animals turning into those sea animals. Then he put molecular data in their cells to make it look like whales have suffered the same accidents of history in their DNA to which the even-toed terrestrial ungulates (pigs, camels, hippos, deer, sheep, goats) have been subject.
But we're not allowed to notice any patterns. We're not allowed to remember any other lines of evidence when considering a new one. He evidently commands some of us to look at a bead at a time, and when we look at a bead, not to notice the chain, and not to remember the warehouse full of other chains. There are no necklaces.
1996. And this is 2003.
Then he put the diagnostic ankle-bones (astralagi) of those even-toed ungulates on the Pakicetus and Ambulocetus fossils.
Modern scholars, beginning with Laurence, all date the origin of the book to the first or second century before Christ, hence it is assigned to the "pseudepigrapha," meaning it is not believed to have been written by the named author. It is dated using standard "scholarly" methods. One rule of dating used by modern scholars, is that if anything is prophesied which turns out to be correct, it must have been written after the event, because otherwise the author would really have to have been a prophet! This complete rejection of the entire concept of revelation forced Laurence to put the authorship of the Book of Enoch extremely late because he saw that it prophesied not only the existence of Parthia (250 B.C.), but even the reign of King Herod the Great, which began in 37 B.C. On the other hand, it was quoted by the Savior and his apostles so it must have been written before their time. Thus Laurence inferred that the book had been written "before the rise of Christianity; most probably at an early period of the reign of Herod."[8] More modern scholarship has concluded that the book was probably written by several authors over the period of about 180-64 B.C.[9] This extremely recent authorship date of course raises the question of how such a late forgery could have been so totally accepted as genuine in just a few decades, which has never been adequately explained.
In this article, let us consider the outrageous possibility that the work was actually originally written by the prophet Enoch long before the Great Flood and contains many genuine revelations.[10] It probably also contains some interpolations of men, and has suffered from mistakes introduced by the many hand-made transcriptions. But for the purposes of this article, when it says that an angel revealed to Enoch a divine calendar, those statements will be taken at face value. One scientific way to test a hypothesis is to assume it is true and examine the consequences. Let us now apply that method to the astronomy contained in the Book of Enoch.
I forgot Rhodocetus. OTOH, Kutchicetus is smaller than Ambulocetus and there's still a huge size gap from Dorudon to Basilosaurus.