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New Seal Fossil

But it's a fully formed cross between a seal and an otter! Plus look at this admission they were created along with every other animal on day 5:
Until now, the most primitive fossil pinniped was a creature called Enaliarctos that dates from about the same period and appears to have lived in the sea along the northwestern coasts of North America.
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Eleventy!!11!!!
 
FFed said:
Apparently Charles Darwin predicted this fossil, and now it's been found.

Canadian fossil find sheds new light on seal evolution
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ETA: Oops, perhaps not:
The Puijila darwini is the oldest and most primitive pinniped skeleton found to date, though the scientists say it is not a direct relative of today's seals.

Instead, they believe modern seals, as well as the Puijila darwini likely evolved separately from a common ancestor.
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So not direct proof of Darwin's prediction, it seems to me.


Here's the first relevant passage from On the Origin of Species (first edition) (Project Gutenberg) that I have found,

"...we can hardly believe that the webbed feet of the upland goose or of the frigate-bird are of special use to these birds...and in the flipper of the seal, are of special use to these animals. We may safely attribute these structures to inheritance. But to the progenitor of the upland goose and of the frigate-bird, webbed feet no doubt were as useful as they now are to the most aquatic of existing birds. So we may believe that the progenitor of the seal had not a flipper, but a foot with five toes fitted for walking or grasping;"

In edition six, he goes further and discusses why a seal might not revert back to a terrestrial mammal,

"Therefore Sir C. Lyell asks, and assigns certain reasons in answer, why have not seals and bats given birth on such islands to forms fitted to live on the land? But seals would necessarily be first converted into terrestrial carnivorous animals of considerable size, and bats into terrestrial insectivorous animals; for the former there would be no prey; for the bats ground-insects would serve as food, but these would already be largely preyed on by the reptiles or birds, which first colonise and abound on most oceanic islands. Gradations of structure, with each stage beneficial to a changing species, will be favoured only under certain
peculiar conditions. A strictly terrestrial animal, by occasionally hunting for food in shallow water, then in streams or lakes, might at last be converted into an animal so thoroughly aquatic as to brave the open ocean. But seals would not find on oceanic islands the conditions favourable to their gradual reconversion into a terrestrial form."
 
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