The Hagfish in the Room

Hagfish have it all—a wrinkled, spineless, worm-like body; a grotesque spiky tongue that tears pieces of carrion from the seafloor; and best of all, revolting slime secretions that choke potential predators. And a recent fossil discovery shows that the earliest hagfish had all the charm of its modern descendants.

Scientists recently found a hagfish fossil in Lebanon, which they date at 100 million years old based on evolutionary assumptions. Hagfish fossils are rare because they have no hard bones to help preserve them upon death. Even more remarkable, the slime was preserved with the fossil. (Even more remarkable than that, no one questioned how organic material could possibly be preserved for 100 million years.)

The evolutionary scientists examining this rare fossil concluded that hagfish evolved their sophisticated slime defense mechanism much earlier than suspected. That causes researchers to put hagfish in a different position on the evolutionary tree. No longer believed to be primitive ancestors of modern fish, hagfish are now considered a unique parallel development, like lampreys.

For biblical creationists, this hagfish fossil is yet another proof that God created many different kinds of sophisticated, fully functional animals from the beginning.

The early evolution of sophisticated defenses is a challenge for scientists, and the preservation of soft tissue for millions of years is about as hard to swallow as hagfish slime. The fact that no one even questions soft tissue anymore is the real elephant in the room. Based on everything we know about chemistry, this slime can’t be 100 million years old. Instead, it is just more clear evidence that the worldwide flood of Noah’s day quickly buried and rapidly preserved all sorts of amazing creatures only a few thousand years ago.

Article was taken from Answers magazine, July–August, 2019, 21.