The Fossil Evidence of Hagfish

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There's two fossils of hagfish. There has been heated debate on whether hagfish never developed a backbone or if they had one and then just devolved the other way, gradually get rid of the sucker. So kind of like a handsome, lanky drifter who's also slimy and eats corpses, their backstory is still a mystery. Who's got those two fossils? Where are they? That's a good question.

Hagfish: these floppy hot dogs of the deep sea deserve our undying respect. Tim Winegard is a professional hagfishologist (YES IT'S A WORD) at Chapman University, and he dishes on the world's slimiest treasures. Prepare to hear about swift escapes, spellbinding clots of slime, patchy backstories, aphrodisiacs, outlasting extinction events, why you don't always need a spine, eating your way out of a dead whale, and -- like a slippery messiah -- turning water to slime. Also Alie confronts her fear of m*cus.

Comparative Biomaterials Lab at Chapman University: https://sites.chapman.edu/fudge/

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This week's donation went to the Wildlife Research Station: https://www.algonquinwrs.ca

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Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris

Theme song by Nick Thorburn

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