Carroll, Robert L., Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1988), 698 pp.
p. 138
"We have no intermediate fossils between rhipidistian fish and early
amphibians…."
pp. 181-4
"Despite these similarities, frogs, salamanders, and caecilians are very
different from one another in skeletal structure and ways of life, both now and
throughout their known fossil record … we have found no fossil evidence of any
possible antecedents that possessed the specialized features common to all three
modern orders…. In the absence of fossil evidence that frogs, salamanders, and
caecilians evolved from a close common ancestor, we must consider the
possibility that each of the modern orders evolved from a distinct group of
Paleozoic amphibians."
p. 467
"No specific derived characters have been demonstrated as being uniquely
shared between early primates and the early members of any other order."
Colbert, Edwin H., and M. Morales, Evolution of the Vertebrates (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1991), 510 pp.
p. 99
"Despite these similarities, there is no evidence of any Paleozoic
amphibians combining the characteristics that would be expected in a single
common ancestor. The oldest known frogs, salamanders, and caecilians are very
similar to their living descendants."
Hopson, James A., and Leonard B. Radinsky, "Vertebrate Paleontology: New Approaches and New Insights," Paleobiology, vol. 6 (Summer 1980), pp. 250-270. Hopson and Radinsky were in the Anatomy Department at the University of Chicago.
p. 258
"The oldest known tetrapods, the ichthyostegid amphibians of the Late
Devonian, though first reported on in 1932 and represented by numerous
specimens, have never been completely described. No clearly intermediate form in
the fish-tetrapod transition has been discovered…."
Anonymous, "Lungfish: Ins and Outs of Evolution," Science News, vol. 108 (November 15, 1975), p. 310.
p. 310
"Three animal physiologists, J. P. Lumhalt, … K. Johansen, … and G. M.
O. Maloiy … state, in the Oct. 30 Nature, that the first appearance of
negative-pressure inhalation is credited to now-extinct amphibians. Yet, no
suctional breathing has been seen in air-breathing vertebrates below reptiles….
"The link, then, between water breathing and air breathing, between swimming and walking, was the strange, primitive lungfish…. ‘When he dived into the mud,’ … he dived into a blind alley…. If anything, he was worse off than before."
White, Errol, "A Little on Lungfishes," Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of London, vol. 177 (January 1966), pp. 1-9.
p. 1
"We must remember that the idea that these extraordinary animals were
amphibia has not entirely died out."
p. 8
"… like all the other groups of fishes their origins are masked in
obscurity…. But whatever ideas authorities may have on the subject, the
lungfishes, like every other major groups of fishes that I know, have their
origins firmly based in nothing, a matter of hot dispute among the
experts, each of whom is firmly convinced that everyone else is wrong."
p. 8
"I have often thought how little I would like to have to prove organic
evolution in a court of law. In my experience of fossil fishes, while one can
see the general drift of evolution readily enough, when it comes to pin-pointing
the linkages, whether it be at generic level or at that of a higher group, the
links are invariably either missing altogether or faulty, that is to say, always
one or more characters are out of phase—even the ichthyostegids, which for all
their superficially apparent intermediate position between the rhipidistian
fishes and the amphibia, are too advanced in respect of some characters, such as
the back of the head, to be ancestral to the first true amphibians."
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