Here's another physical evidence strengthening the evolution concept:
Feathers found in amber offer glimpse of early birds, dinosaurs
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/09/dinosaurs-feathers-amber.html
Those feathers are about 70 million years old. That's a relatively young specimen.
Feather discoveries are not new.
The first feather discovery was from an Archaeopteryx (lived in the Late Jurassic Period around
150 million years ago), unearthed in 1860, only one year after the publication of Darwin's
On the Origin of Species in 1859.
The Archeopteryx is a bird. Thus, evolutionary ornithologist Allan Feduccia wrote in
Science magazine:
I conclude that Archaeopteryx was arboreal and volant [i.e., possessing extended wings for flight], considerably advanced aerodynamically, and probably capable of flapping, powered flight to at least some degree. Archaeopteryx...was, in the modern sense, a bird (1993, 259:792).The fossil remains of two crow-sized birds 75 million years older than Archaeopteryx (i.e., approximately
225 million years old) were found in 1986 by Sankar Chatterjee and colleagues from Texas Tech University, which Chatterjee named as Protoavis texensis (first bird from Texas).
The discovery has caused evolutionists severe problems because Protoavis appeared at the time of the earliest dinosaurs, which means that if it is accepted as genuine, then birds certainly could not have evolved from dinosaurs and Archaeopteryx could not be the ancestor of modern birds.
After looking at the evidence for Protoavis, Larry Martin, paleontologist and curator of the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center (University of Kansas) suggested: “There’s going to be a lot of people with Archaeopteryx eggs on their face” (as quoted in Anderson, 1991, 253:35).
The discovery of an old bird feather does not prove evolution. All it proves is the discovery of an old bird.
George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most influential paleontologists of the twentieth century, who was also a major participant in the modern evolutionary synthesis, said:
This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate. A fortiori, it is also true of the classes, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants (1944, p. 105).
Paleontologist David Kitts said:
Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of “seeing” evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of “gaps” in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them…. (1974, 28:467).
