The Bible is the claim, not the evidence

[Lemonvariable72]

Mutation is random. Natural selection is not. Whoever taught you about evolution did a poor job.

That is how I was "taught" evolution by the JWs. My impression of the theory of evolution for a long time was that a mutation would appear (like a fully formed eyeball) and simply be carried over to each successive generation until you eventually had a new organism. So a lizard would be born with a beak, and successive generations would be born with beaks until there was one that was born with feathers, and they'd have beaks and feathers until one was born with its arms shaped into wings... and so on.

You can understand why such a person would wonder "why aren't there any transitional forms in the fossil record?" I think that many of them are waiting for the discovery of a fossil lizard with a beak, and of a fossil lizard with a beak and feathers, and so on. They cannot envision a scenario where evolution would occur aside from that. The "croco-duck" thing is a perfect example of that. There is this belief that evolution entails massive, wholesale changes on an unimaginable scale (such as a duck being born with a crocodile's head, or vice-versa) and that without those "transitional forms" evolution is simply bad science that shows just how desperate secular scientists are.

It's not that we believed that this could actually happen! On the contrary, it seemed as preposterous to us as it should to you. And we wondered how it was possible that people fell for such obvious silliness. The only possible explanation was that the desire to reject god simply overrode any sense of reasonableness. In other words, SATAN.

And then I learned how evolution really worked and... D'OH!!!

You mean like this fellow?

Oviraptor is a genus of small Mongolian theropod dinosaur, first discovered by the paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, and first described by Henry Fairfield Osborn, in 1924. Its name is Latin for 'egg taker' or "egg seizer", referring to the fact that the first fossil specimen was discovered atop a pile of what were thought to be Protoceratops eggs, and the specific name philoceratops means "lover of ceratopsians", also given as a result of this find. In his 1924 paper, Osborn explained that the name was given due to the close proximity of the skull of Oviraptor to the nest (it was separated from the eggs by only 4 inches or 10 centimetres of sand). However, Osborn also suggested that the name Oviraptor "may entirely mislead us as to its feeding habits and belie its character".[1] In the 1990s, the discovery of nesting oviraptorids like Citipati proved that Osborn was correct in his caution regarding the name. These finds showed that the eggs in question probably belonged to Oviraptor itself, and that the specimen was actually brooding its eggs, when it died at the nest.

Oviraptor lived in the late Cretaceous period, during the late Campanian stage about 75 million years ago; only one definitive specimen is known (with associated eggs), from the Djadokhta Formation of Mongolia, though a possible second specimen (also with eggs) comes from the northeast region of Inner Mongolia, China, in an area called Bayan Mandahu.[2]