Help! What organs have good fossil records?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Are you serious? I could interpret your comment as a joke.

Completely serious. I've recommended both books before. They make no assumptions beyond that of hoping the reader is reasonably intelligent. I still have them here, I think.

[Berthold]

There is also a nice website, of which I have heard only recently.

[camoguard]

I'll look that over. It's new to me too.

[lpetrich]

Bony-vertebrate skeletons are remarkably good, as some others here have pointed out. You may not be able to learn much from any one of the bones in isolation, but you can learn a remarkable amount from a well-preserved skeleton, and even from the more detailed bones, like the skull.

I say bony-vertebrate ones because sharks and various primitive fish and proto-fish do not have a bony skeleton, but instead a cartilage one, which does not fossilize very well. However, shark teeth do fossilize, and some rock formations contain large numbers of them. If sharks had gone extinct before any member of our species could get a look at them, then their teeth would have been as big as mystery as conodonts had been for several decades. Conodonts are found in large numbers in Paleozoic and early Mesozoic rocks, but their owners were not found for a LONG time -- they were proto-fish with a cartilage skeleton.

Outside of vertebratedom, the best animal-kingdom ones are arthropods -- their skins serve as their skeletons, and can preserve a lot of detail. Echinoderms are next, but much of the animal kingdom does not have very informative hard parts. The shells of shelled cephalopods do not tell us how many tentacles their owners had had, for instance.

[mistermack]

I would say, for the purpose that you want, the horse's hoof would be a good one.
It's pretty well written into the fossil record, and you can compare how different animals went different ways.

I doubt if anything will convince people who don't really want to know though.
I think of evolution like a giant jigsaw of the mona lisa, with millions of pieces.
We haven't finished putting it together, there are thousands of missing pieces, but any fool can stand back, and see what it is.
The religious look at the same thing, and point to the missing pieces, and say it's not proved, even though it's bleedin obvious it's the Mona Lisa.
You can't argue with people like that.
.

[lpetrich]

I've come across numerous descriptions of equine evolution, much more than that of their perissodactyl relatives (tapirs, rhinos, etc.), or of artiodactyls.

In the equid fossil record, you can watch the middle toe expand and the side toes shrink and disappear -- one can clearly recognize intermediates like a three-toed state, with a big middle one and two small ones on each side.

[egbert]

I want one example of an organ whose development has good records. I've seen the eye arguments against irreducible complexity but I'm wondering if you folks know of an organ development (including the eye) where I can see a proper journal dating the transitions or some similar piece of data.

I'm proevolution like a reasonable person, but I was asked if I could identify one organ that was developed with recorded transitions and I thought I would try.

Penis?

[camoguard]

Ha. Mine develops through natural erection.

[GenesForLife]

Teeth?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

http://www.talkorigins.org/

[camoguard]

This thread ended up being a good start for me. Now that I've got good sources and peers I've been wondering how we can get people educated in such a way that dumb people aren't running for office. I normally say that nicer, but that's the idea.