How the Turtle Got Its Shell

Discovery news has a "fascinating article" on their site concerning the evolution of the turtle and its shell.
Fascinating if you are gullible. If you aren't, its pretentious.

The term "missing link" was used twice in the article, one example here:

"This is very clear evidence that the shell is a composite structure," James Parham of the Field Museum in Chicago said." It is a missing link. This is one of the most important turtle fossils ever found, I think."

As you can see from the fossil, there are clearly a lot of conclusions that can be drawn; and even though I don't pretend to be a fossil expert, nor a turtle expert, the "evidence" seems, at best, tenuous.

Walter Joyce of Yale University was the first to identify the new fossil as a primordial turtle from just a few bits of the neck and shell. "It's a pretty ugly fossil, really," Joyce said of the jumbled pieces he examined, "almost like a shoebox full of crud."

If this is the level of scientific scholarship that supports the Theory of Evolution - which is doubtless more than Discovery is going to report, at least I hope so - and particularly the quality of science that stands in the way of open theories, ie ID or Creationism, or just plain, good science, then I must heartily agree with Ben Stein in Expelled.
The mainstream media jumps on this "evidence" as a missing link without stating the obvious: that historical evidence still falls outside the realm of empirical science and the absolute most that we can infer from the "shoebox full of crud" is that there was once an animal that was similar to a turtle in that it had a shell, and even that seems hard to swallow.

The Harvard Handbook of Science and Religion argues that science has now become discriminatory and shuns any non-natural explanation for a problem. Completely ignoring any meta-physical implications, materialist scientists jump to unscientific conclusions supporting a priori biases. (paraphrased - I will look up the page when I get home.)
Science, good science, leads to a fork in the road where science can no longer empirically support the conclusions, and always will. The data tells us what is, but not from where it came. "Either God made everything from nothing or nothing became everything on its own." Which contradicts almost every other law of nature known to Man.