Once Again the Proposed "Ancestor" Becomes Just Another Cousin - Hagfish Fossil

The hagfish is one of the most gruesome and alien-looking creatures on earth. Along with lampreys, they make up a group of "jawless vertebrates". Above is a picture of the head of a hagfish. The mouth closes vertically, unlike basically every other non-insect animal. Muscles just sort of mush the cartilage together, there is no jaw. They use their comb-like teeth to strip flesh off of the bodies of animal carcasses which sink to the ocean floor.

This creature has also been proposed as a "living fossil" which represents what the ancestor of all vertebrates looked like. In other words, many scientists proposed that something which looked much like a hagfish gave rise to all other vertebrates. Other scientists saw them as a derived form of whatever gave rise to vertebrates- another branch in the vertebrate tree and not a remnant of the trunk.

When I saw this article on Science Daily yesterday "Fossilized Slime of 100-million Year Old Hagfish Shakes up Vertebrate Family Tree" I was interested in it, but I knew what it was going to say before I ever clicked on it. It was going to say that yet-another group that was believed to represent a basal type instead turned out to be just another "sister group". I knew that because I had seen it so many times before. Scientists think they find the "trunk" of some evolutionary tree, but when they look at the evidence more closely they don't see a "Y" with one original type splitting into two or more branches. They see a series of parallel lines, at least when looking above the "Family" level of classification. It's not the "common ancestor" that they had hoped it would be.

Sure enough, it happened again. I'll just lay out the key quote:

Features of the new fossil help place hagfish and their relatives on the vertebrate family tree. In the past, scientists have disagreed about where they belonged, depending on how they tackled the question. Those who rely on fossil evidence alone tend to conclude that hagfish are so primitive that they are not even vertebrates. This implies that all fishes and their vertebrate descendants had a common ancestor that -- more or less -- looked like a hagfish.
But those who work with genetic data argue that hagfish and lampreys are more closely related to each other. This suggests that modern hagfish and lampreys are the odd ones out in the family tree of vertebrates. In that case, the primitive appearance of hagfish and lampreys is deceptive, and the common ancestor of all vertebrates was probably something more conventionally fish-like.
Miyashita's work reconciles these two approaches, using physical evidence of the animal's anatomy from the fossil to come to the same conclusion as the geneticists: that the hagfish and lampreys should be grouped separately from the rest of fishes.

So there you have it. The hagfish and lamprey's don't represent a basal ancestor which gave rise to vertebrates. They are their own thing. Even more amazingly, it's not even like one of those two represent a form which gave rise to the other.  Contrary to what scientists previously believed even hagfish and lampreys appear to be sister groups with neither one derived from the other.

I should have been keeping a list of every time I came on an article where scientists announce results which "explain how evolution occurred" when in fact the results show that what they once thought was a basal group was actually just a sister group. The original ancestor would then be a hypothetical form which existed sometime in the distant past. I'm not saying it never goes the other way. On occasion they predict a creature with certain features will be found and sometimes a fossil like that will be found. But even in some of those cases, the story does not really add up and what they are really looking at is a 'composite' creature, not a true intermediate.

The other issue from the article is that the 100-million year old fossil had chemical traces in it which indicated that the creature had a "slime defense" system similar to living hagfish today. Hagfish have special glands along their body which secrete an amazing amount of slime when they are threatened. A tub of them can turn the water into the consistency of jelly! The slime gets in gills and can interfere with breathing. Apparently even this amazing and chemically and anatomically complex defense system was already present in hagfish 100-million years ago! Where is the evolution?

Now I am not saying that evolution didn't happen at all. I am sure a lot of it did. It's just not the total explanation. I am more inclined to the explanation given in early Genesis. The earth and the waters brought forth living things at God's command, but they also had God's help. It wasn't just evolution, it was creation too. And of course, for man himself, the earth was not involved, except as a source of raw material. Man was God's doing.

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