As Nicholas Pyenson, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History curator of fossil marine mammals, puts it: “Life is really a tree, not a chain.” But there’s good reason not to use the phrase-which Darwin himself knew. It certainly checks a lot of boxes for an animal that seems between what were thought to be two distinct categories of organism. Today, some still refer to Archaeopteryx as that long-sought “missing link” between birds and dinosaurs.
“Had the Solenhofen quarries been commissioned-by august command-to turn out a strange being ‘a la Darwin,'” he wrote his friend, “it could not have executed the behest more handsomely-than in the Archæopteryx.” The feathers left no question that the Jurassic Archaeopteryx was a bird, but the creature also had a suite of saurian traits that pointed to a reptilian ancestry.įalconer could hardly contain his glee. This extraordinary fossil -bearing feathers as well as teeth, claws, a bony tail and other reptilian traits -was just the sort of creature that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection predicted should exist. On January 3rd, 1863, Charles Darwin received a letter from his paleontologist friend Hugh Falconer with news of a tantalizing find: Archaeopteryx. Less than two years after the publication of Origins, he got his wish. Though the term never once appears in the book, Darwin knew that his claims could benefit greatly from paleontological evidence of a species transition-an intermediate species connecting, for instance, humans to apes and monkeys.
When Darwin published Origin of Species, one thing was missing from his argument: a “missing link.”
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