Admitting Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as a trade secret of Paleontology. Evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have…

— Stephen Jay Gould

Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.

— Stephen Jay Gould

There are gaps in the fossil graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms, but where there is nothing whatsoever instead. No paleontologist..denies that…

— David Berlinski

The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.

— Soren Kierkegaard

Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this…

— Ernst Mayr

Paleontologists had long been aware of a seeming contradiction between Darwin's postulate of gradualism, confirmed by the work of population genetics, and the actual…

— Ernst Mayr

We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn't changed much... We have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition…

— David M. Raup

It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families,…

— George Gaylord Simpson

“Wherever sufficiently numerous series of the remains of any given group, which has endured for a long space of time, are carefully examined, their…

— Thomas Henry Huxley

Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.

— Charles Darwin

Wherever we look at the living biota … discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent…The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species usually…

— Ernst Mayr

“Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and palaeontology does not provide them.”

— David Kitts