The lead-in article contains a classic Darwinian prop, an illustration of a series of fossils purporting to show a Darwinian progression from one form to a fundamentally different one.

A passage from Jonathan Wells' book Icons of Evolution might have been written as a direct response to this illustration except that the book was written years before the picture (though, if you read chapter six of the book, you'll see that problems of chronology do not always hinder Darwinists in their story-telling efforts):

Henry Gee, chief science writer for Nature... [wrote:] "No fossil is buried with its birth certificate" ... and "the intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent." It's hard enough, with written records, to trace a human lineage back a few hundred years. When we have only a fragmentary fossil record, and we're dealing with millions of years -- what Gee calls "Deep Time" -- the job is effectively impossible... Gee concludes: "To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story -- amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."

And yet the icons of evolution must be found where they can be found. As the news article in the current issue of Nature puts it, "The newly discovered fossil, Tiktaalik roseae ... might in time become as much of an evolutionary icon as the proto-bird Archaeopteryx."

Jonathan Wells discusses Archaeopteryx in Chapter 6 of Icons of Evolution. He concludes:

Some biology textbooks continue to present Archaeopteryx as the classic example of a missing link. Mader's 1998 Biology calls it "a transitional link between reptiles and birds," and William Schraer and Herbert Stoltze's 1999 Biology: The Study of Life tells students that "many scientists believe it represents an evolutionary link between reptiles and birds."

But both sides in the current controversy over bird origins agree that modern birds are probably not descended from Archaeopteryx. And although the two factions disagree about the ancestry of Archaeopteryx, neither one has really solved the problem. Following the logic of Darwin's theory to sometimes silly extremes, cladists insist that the ancestors of Archaeopteryx were bird-like dinosaurs that do not appear in the fossil record until tens of millions of years later. Their critics look to animals that clearly lived earlier, but have not yet found one similar enough to Archaeopteryx to be a good candidate. As a result, both sides are still looking for the missing link.

Isn't it ironic that Archaeopteryx, which more than any other fossil persuaded people of Darwin's theory in the first place, has been dethroned largely by cladists, who more than any other biologists have taken Darwin's theory to its logical extreme? The world's most beautiful fossil, the specimen Ernst Mayr called "the almost perfect link between reptiles and birds," has been quietly shelved, and the search for missing links continues as though Archaeopteryx had never been found. (134)

Given all of this, Nature's comparison of Archaeopteryx to this new and much ballyhooed fossil sort of puts things in perspective. I'm reminded of a scene from This is Spinal Tap, where the heavy metal band finds itself at Graceland in front of Elvis's grave.

Nigel: It really puts perspective on things, though, doesn't it?

David: ... There's too much [bleeping] perspective now.