We all know it was Charles Dickens who wrote the classic work, Great Expectations, but Charles Darwin, knowing that his theory demanded transitional stages if ever it was to be considered a reasonable hypothesis, lived in the hope or expectation that many such transitions would materialize from the fossil record. He wrote: "The number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great." (emphasis added)

"Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?" (emphasis added) Phillip Johnson - Darwin on Trial p.46

Darwin acknowledged in his book, The Origin of the Species, the lack of transitions in the fossil record was....

In a personal letter to Asa Gray (1858) Darwin admitted that
'Imagination must fill up the very wide blanks.'
          Michael Denton - Evolution: A Theory in Crisis - p.117

"The concept of evolution touted in textbooks, then, is based on phantoms and figments of the imagination, not on fossils and the facts of science. Stephen Gould and Niles Eldredge (both evolutionists) put it this way: 'Phyletic gradualism [gradual evolution]… was never "seen" in the rocks'."