Answers in Genesis in “Those Fossils Are a Problem!” tell us:
Sunderland formally, and in detail, interviewed five leading fossil experts from the world’s major fossil museums. Face to face in a formal scientific discussion, they not only confirm, but also enhance, what creation scientists such as Dr Duane Gish have been saying all along. (For an example, see panel.) Sunderland relentlessly takes the reader on an excursion with the experts to every single major transition-the net result is devastating. Australian anti-creationist palaeontologist Michael Archer is still insisting that evolutionary transition is adequately documented in the fossils. The ‘best of the best’ in the evolutionary fossil camp claim otherwise, in their own words.
AiG continues this in another file:
NONE of the five museum officials whom Luther Sunderland interviewed could offer a single example of a transitional series of fossilized organisms that would document the transformation of one basically different type to another. Dr Eldredge [curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the American Museum] said that the categories of families and above could not be connected, while Dr Raup [curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago] said that a dozen or so large groups could not be connected with each other. But Dr Patterson [a senior palaeontologist and editor of a prestigious journal at the British Museum of Natural History] spoke most freely about the absence of transitional forms.
Now one of the people interviewed, Niles Eldredge, wrote about this in his 1982 book The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism (New York: Washington Square Press). On pages 130-131, while discussing creationists distorting “the words and works of scientists,” he tells us:
The ICR’s Gary Parker has been among the more blatant offenders. On page 95 of his Creation: The Facts of Life, we read: “Famous paleontologists at Harvard, the American Museum, and even the British Museum say we have not a single example of evolutionary transition at all.” This is untrue. A prominent creationist interviewed a number of paleontologists at those institutions and elsewhere (actually, he never did get to Harvard). I was one of them. Some of us candidly admitted that there are some procedural difficulties in recognizing ancestors and that, yes, the fossil record is rather full of gaps. Nothing new there. This creationist then wrote letters to various newspapers, and even testified at hearings that the paleontologists he interviewed admitted that there are no intermediates in the fossil record. Thus, the lie has been perpetuated by Parker. All of the paleontologists interviewed have told me that they did cite examples of intermediates to the interviewer. The statement is an outright distortion of the willing admission by paleontologists concerned with accuracy that, to be sure, there are gaps in the fossil record. Such is creationist “scholarship.”
It gets worse. The Answers in Genesis article continues with a letter written by the late Colin Patterson. The creationists falsely claim it means Patterson meant that there are no transitional forms when he did not and made very clear that he did not. See “Patterson Misquoted: A Tale of Two ‘Cites.’”