Summations Only

I thought I'd take just one example from you list to show how the 'living fossil' concept confuses. Tuataras are not lizards - that is the very reason they're on your list. What makes tuataras special is that they have no close living relatives. It's a sphenodontian, and the only living animal that possesses the combination of features unique to sphenodontians. These, it is true, have been around for 200 million years, but tuataras haven't. Fossil tuataras are not known from much earlier than 100,000 years.Now, you may think this is just nitpicking, but it's relevant to your claim that these animals haven't changed. We can point to a single surviving representative of a group of organisms and point out that the group has been around for hundreds of millions of years, with the implication that they have looked the same for all this time. But when you include the diversity of the group's fossil members, you will often realise that's this is clearly false. Here's one fossil sphenodontian (Pleurosaurus, to be precise, about 150 mya): Here, for comparison, is a tuatara skeleton: Spot the difference.

You keep making this point to Faith over and over again, that this is what species means, this is how it's defined, but this seems somewhat unfair, since almost no working biologist actually defines species this way. And I'm not talking about asexual species - few mammal species, as we usually consider them, are genetically incompatible with their nearest neighbours. And many of them do interbreed in the wild - consistently and regularly.To take one example, different baboon species often hybridise at their margins. Now, you could take a lumping view and say that you don't accept six (or seven, or eight etc.) species of baboon, and consider the hybridising populations con-specific. But then you'd need to lump all baboon species into one, since all are interfertile. And you couldn't stop there either, since baboons often hybridise in the wild with geladas as well; and possibly mangabeys. The kipunji has been argued to be derived from a hybrid mangabey-baboon population.So let's stop insisting on a fruitless argument that this is what species means when we don't really mean, and it doesn't actually. If you both agree that a daughter population can be genetically incompatible with its parent, then what's the disagreement?

If you believe the bolded part - you need to look at more dogs. The structural variation in dogs is enormous - an Irish wolfhound is not just a really big chihuahua - they're clearly different shapes. I found a nice collection of photos here on a blog about how to draw animals:

I was considering 'fit together the same way' to mean 'be in the same relative position to one another', which the dog bones clearly aren't. All that changed with the therapsid bones was relative size, shape and position - all of which vary in the dog skulls.

I beg to differ:

To make this point clear, we know how people's heads are made this shape, as it continued to happen into historical times, and even continues today in a few places, such as the eastern Congo. The below is not a fraud, nor anything supernatural. He is a normal human being. His unusually-shaped head is simply the result of wrapping it tightly in cloth as a baby so it was constrained to grow in this shape. Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

According to Wikipedia, there are numbers showing that the cranial capacity of the Paracas skulls is not significantly different from normal Peruvian skulls, but the cited source is behind a paywall:Freiss, M. & Baylac, Michel (2003), "Exploring artificial cranial deformation using elliptic Fourier analysis of procrustes aligned outlines", Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 122 (1)

It's not a matter of accepting that the picture is an accurate representation. The point is that if you do not believe humans can move rocks of such size, then you believe there were giants moving rocks in the 18th century, not only in the ancient past. Probably because this is the first time you have mentioned them. Seems to make more sense to dicuss the silly ideas you propose, instead of picking any old silly idea at random.

The depth required to lithify the sediment is quite variable depending on the local conditions and the type of sediment; but there are places today (ie. Arizona) where the bedrock is almost 5 km deep. The sand at the bottom of the Sonoran desert is more than enough pressure to turn to rock - all that's needed is enough time for the sediment to crystallise. And there are no 'different types of sediment' necessary in this case - there's just a shitload of sand; some of which will certainly be sandstone in the next few hundred thousand years.There is no disappearance - the stuff at the bottom is lithifying slowly as we speak; while animals and plants still carry on as normal at the surface.

At its widest point, the canyon is 27 times as wide as you estimate it should be after 17 million years. Not that this really means anything, since the 'estimate' just seems to be a number you made up.