The recent discovery of a 375 million-year-old "missing link" between its aquatic 385 million-year-old ancestral fishes and its descendant 365 million-year-old terrestrial amphibians is considered remarkable enough to have made the front page of The New York Times on April 6. The beautifully preserved fossil's name is Tiktaalik. It's facetiously called a "fishapod" to indicate its intermediate evolutionary position between limbless finned fishes and tetrapod (4-legged) amphibians.

Tiktaalik has created a jubilant sensation among Darwinian scientists because its discovery provides powerful additional credibility to the concept of evolution. However, Tiktaalik's existence in the fossil record has evoked disbelief, dismay, and gloom among religious Creationists, who subject all scientific knowledge, discoveries, and theories to the same simple test: Is it mentioned in the Bible? If so, it's true and believable. If not, it's arrant nonsense that must be ignored or opposed. Creationists believe, according to the Bible, that the Intelligent Designer (God), created all past and present life simultaneously about 6,000 years ago. This idea is similar to past beliefs about a flat earth, or an earth surrounded by stars, planets and the sun, all orbiting around us.

There are more fossils in sediments and in hardened sedimentary rocks than there are sand grains on all the world's beaches. By careful, detailed, open-minded studies of fossils and their relationships to contemporaneous, ancestral, and descendant extant and extinct organisms, innumerable known evolutionary links and undiscovered missing links are now known to be buried within sedimentary layers that each overlie the older preceding layers which had been deposited earlier in chronologic order, with the oldest ones at the bottom and the youngest layers at the top.

Creationists have always contended that evolution never occurred because no unambiguous missing link had ever been discovered --- which is not true. Tiktaalik is a missing link par excellence in that it is unquestionably transitional between fishes and the first tetrapod primitive amphibians (which resembled crocodiles more than today's frogs and toads). Tiktaalik has the jaws, fins, and scales of a fish --- as well as the skull, ribs, and front and rear legs of a tetrapod amphibian. Creationists had previously claimed confidently that an intermediate link between fishes and tetrapods would never be found because it countered the Bible's teaching. But now they claim that Tiktaalik's discovery is not enough proof of evolution; and that evolution is still questionable because a link between invertebrates and vertebrates has never been found.

But Creationists are wrong. They are not aware or they're ignoring the fact that Pikaea, a roughly 550 million-year-old transitional link between invertebrate and vertebrate animals, has been known for almost 50 years. Furthermore, among the Ediacara (extinct soft-bodied animals that lived 650 million years ago), two organisms, Tribrachidium and Parvancorina are respectively, links to the shelled echinoderms that still survive today, and to the trilobites, extinct arthropods that first evolved about 100 million years later. In addition, 250 million-year-old Synapsids (the first tetrapods to evolve synapsid openings in the skull behind the eye sockets through which tendons connecting the lower jaw to the skull are located, are obvious links between their ancestral reptiles (who lacked synapsid openings that enabled more efficient chewing), and their descendant mammals who all have synapsid openings in the skull. Also, the famous 160 million-year-old Archaeopteryx is a perfect example of an evolutionary link between its extinct ancestral dinosaurs which had reptilean jaws, teeth, bones, and claws --- and its modern bird descendents which all have beaks and feathers.

There can never be agreement between evolutionists and creationists --- inasmuch as the formers' works and understandings are based on unfettered science that is always subject to questioning, re-interpretation, and revision as new information comes to light --- while the latter's works and understandings are rigidly controlled, unchanging and immune from challenges and re-interpretation.