Mammalian Explosion 301sediments. The most amazing thing about the specimen is that the middle ear bones are still
connected to the lower jaw! This animal could hear with its quadrate/articular (incus/malleus)
like any other mammal, yet the bones had still not migrated to the middle ear!
All of this amazing evidence, of course, is hard for creationists to stomach. Some, such
as Duane Gish, tried to ridicule the whole idea by joking about these creatures “chewing
and hearing while rearticulating their jaws.” He never explained to his audience how most
reptiles indeed hear with their lower jaw, or that we have fossils like Diarthrognathus with
both jaw articulations operating simultaneously, or that human ear bones were originally in
their jaws during their early embryonic stages. Gish (1995:147–173) attempted to discredit
this beautiful evolutionary sequence of synapsids by his usual method: quoting people out
of context or quoting outdated sources that do not reflect what we know now. He mines
Tom Kemp’s (1982) 35-year-old book for quotes that seem to say there was no transitional
sequence in synapsids—but if you read the quotes closely, what Kemp is saying is that we
don’t have many gradual transformations between each of the synapsid genera (most of
which are known only from a few fossils). But that does not mean that we can’t line up the
genera (as we did here) and produce a beautiful evolutionary sequence among the genera
(fig. 13.3). In other cases, Gish claimed that there is a black hole of missing fossils in the
Mesozoic—but that gap has long ago been filled by some amazing fossils. Most of the rest of
Gish’s criticisms reveal that he had absolutely no firsthand knowledge of these fossils or their
anatomy but simply mines other people’s work for quotes that seem to support his biases
and then pulls them out of context so they seem to say something that the author never
intended. Once again, this is dishonest and unscientific. If Gish had been really interested in
the truth, he would have done his homework, learned some anatomy and paleontology, and
studied the fossils for himself—and he would have found one of the best macroevolutionary
transitions between two major groups of animals ever documented.
How do the intelligent design creationists handle this extraordinary transitional series?
Wells (2000) doesn’t address it, nor does Sarfati (1999, 2002). Davis and Kenyon (2004:100–101)
quote a few evolutionists out of context and even concede, “Without a doubt, the Therapsids
are highly suggestive of a Darwinian lineage.” But then they betray their complete lack of
understanding of evolution and try to discount the entire example by arguing that it is not
a single ancestral lineage but many different lineages. That is exactly how most evolution-
ary transitions work in a bushy, branching system—not as “missing links” on a nonexistent
“chain of being” (the common creationist misunderstanding) but as multiple, closely related
lineages that each show progressively more mammalian characteristics.
Furballs in the Age of Dinosaurs
With malleus Aforethought
Mammals
Got an earful
Of their ancestors’ Jaws
—John Burns, BiograffitiWhen some people think of life during the Mesozoic, or “age of dinosaurs,” they assume that
the dinosaurs dominated the planet, and mammals had not yet evolved. In fact, the earliest