It's evolution, baby!
Seriously, read Darwin. Not a book about Darwin...Darwin! He observed and documented a lot of things...and if you are going against his theory without ever reading his words, just shut up now.
Evolution is everywhere...life is pretty cool indeed, but really it's just organized rhythms and fire. Beats, and breaths, electric pulses and fires of calories...working to do the same thing over again. Missing links?! Hell yeah there are missing links..the odds of something being turned into a fossil are slim to none. The odds of us finding those particular fossils are way, way slimmer. We get good cross-sections of history through research and exploration...but it's just a scratch on the surface of what's existed all around the world over hundreds of millions of years.
Walk down in the Grand Canyon...you can have a guide point out fossils going back 600 million years. They're not the same ones around today..they change. It's a progression through the layers..it's a process. That's life. If somebody's diet change, their body changes. If somebody's environment changes, they're body changes. The same thing happens to every species of plant and animal on earth. Why do you think scientist don't study domestic garden plants? Because we changed them! Once you take a plant out of it's natural environment...it won't maintain it's 'natural' size/shape. Add in simple breeding and selection, and your end result will look nothing like it did in the wild. That's a form of microevolution...
The same way elephants in poached areas are producing more tuskless males...because the tusked animals are getting killed off for their ivory. The survival rate for a tuskless male is much higher, so there are more tuskless males mating than ever before.
If you think that some scientist, or your preacher, or some foreign leader, really has a grasp on how the world came to be...quit kidding yourself. We are putting pieces together as fast as we can..but there's way more that we don't know than do.
Study it for yourself...watch your surroundings change, then watch people change to fit them. Learn something...the universe is too expansive and dynamic to fathom...but keep trying. Just because you can't imagine that we're floating on a rock with a bunch of other freaky life forms, in one of a billions galaxies, doesn't mean it' not true.
