Casey Luskin wrong about Tiktaalik but article raises some good points

In an article in Evolution News & Views, Casey Luskin said,

. . . this week, Tiktaalik's status as an actual transitional fossil between fish and tetrapods has been called into question by the discovery of unambiguous footprints (with digits) of a full-fledged tetrapod that were made about 20 million years before Tiktaalik.

I disagreed with Luskin's contention that this earlier tetrapod -- 397 million years ago -- calls into question Tiktaalik's status as an actual transitional fossil. I dismissed this as perhaps just a case of "convergent" evolution -- the appearance of similar features in different lines of descent. However, Sleazy PZ's diatribe against Luskin's article prompted me to give Luskin's article a second look to see if it has anything of value. I decided that the important point raised by Luskin's article was the apparent failure of science to predict the discovery of this 397 million year-old fossil despite science's success at predicting discovery of the later Tiktaalik fossil -- I think that deserves some explanation. Finding Tiktaalik was touted as a triumphal demonstration of the predictive power of evolution theory -- scientists predicted where a fossil like Tiktaalik would be found (somewhere in the Arctic) and went there and found it. And what line of descent does this older 397 million year-old fossil fit into? As Luskin's article shows, many questions are being raised -- many of them by presumably Darwinist biologists.