After the capture of a living Coelacanth, evolutionists realized that this was not a transitional form. So they next settled on depicting the fish E. foordi as a transitional “missing link.”
Evolutionists maintained that that the tailed water frog was descended from E. foordi. However, anatomical comparisons of tailed water frog and Eusthenopteron revealed profound differences between the two. This meant that evolutionists had to suppose another transitional form between them. However, no skeleton belonging to this theoretical transition between Eusthenopteron foordi and the tailed water frog Icthyostega has ever been found.
Now, the two favorite subjects for most of the contemporary evolutionary scenarios regarding tetrapod origins are Eusthenopteron (an extinct fish) and Acanthostega (an extinct amphibian). Robert Carroll, in his Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, makes comments on these allegedly related forms:
Acanthostega may be taken as the end points in the transition between fish and amphibians. Of 145 anatomical features that could be compared between these two genera, 91 showed changes associated with adaptation to life on land . . . This is far more than the number of changes that occurred in any one of the transitions involving the origin of the fifteen major groups of Paleozoic tetrapods. 154
154 Maria Genevieve Lavanant, Bilim ve Teknik magazine, April 1984, No. 197, p. 22