Tiktaalik

Creationists are deeply enamoured of the fossil record, because they have been taught (by each other) to repeat, over and over, the mantra that it is full of 'gaps'; 'Show me your "intermediates"!' They fondly (very fondly) imagine that these 'gaps' are an embarrassment to evolutionists...

Missing link: creationist campaigner has Richard Dawkins' official website banned in Turkey
A Turkish court has banned internet users from viewing the official Richard Dawkins website after a Muslim creationist claimed its contents were defamatory and blasphemous.
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ミッシングリンク・ミシングリンク (Missing link) とは、生物の進化過程を連なる鎖として見た時に、連続性が欠けた部分（間隙）を指し、祖先群と子孫群の間にいるであろう進化の中間期にあたる生物・化石が見つかっていない状況を指す語。失われた環とも。

While "missing link" is still a popular term, well-recognized by the public and often used in the popular media, the term is avoided in scientific publications. Some bloggers have called it "inappropriate"; both because the links are no longer "missing", and because human evolution is no longer believed to have occurred in terms of a single linear progression.

When we look at the world around us, we see a wonderous variety of living things—with fins, fronds or feet, living in the deepest ocean or the driest deserts, eating seeds or salmon or sunlight.
The term “missing link” refers to a question people often ask about how species evolve into all these different forms. Shouldn’t there be an intermediate creature between an ape and a human, for example?

Experts consider this an outdated term. Instead, think of evolution as a tree, not a chain. That is, not every animal species directly evolves into another species; just as dodo birds and T-rexes went extinct without evolving into something else, some branches on the evolutionary tree just end.

That means that humans and apes both evolved separately from a common ancestor millions of years ago, as opposed to a single, direct chain as one species evolved into another.

That said, scientists have found many fossils with attributes of creatures that lived close to key branching points in the tree. For example, University of Chicago paleontologist Neil Shubin discovered a very ancient fish fossil named Tiktaalik that had features of our limbs within its fin skeletons—from the time that animals began to move from living solely in oceans onto land.

"Missing link" is a non-scientific term that typically refers to transitional fossils. It is often used in popular science and in the media for any new transitional form. The term originated to describe the hypothetical intermediate form in the evolutionary series of anthropoid ancestors to anatomically modern humans (hominization). The term was influenced by the pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory of the Great Chain of Being and the now-outdated notion that simple organisms are more primitive than complex organisms (orthogenesis).