Twitter Erupts In Terrified Fascination Over Nightmarish Hagfish Facts

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mattstaff
Jan 25, 2019 4:00 PM EST

People found themselves petrified with fear and overwhelmed by paleontoligists' recently shared findings about the 100-million-year-old hagfish slime's capabilities. This eerie, eel-like creature sounds like it swam and slithered right out of a feverish nightmare. If you're curious to learn more about why you'd never want to see one of these in the wild, check out the original article that sent everyone into a frenzy, here. 

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  • 01
    Text - UChicago Medicine Follow @UChicagoMed Today in slime news: the fossilized slime of a 100-million-year-old hagfish shook up the vertebrate family tree.
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 02
    Text - Glenn Zorpette Follow @Electric_Genie Did the hagfish evolutionary line start off more like conventional fish and then become really weird? Or was it strange at the time of divergence from the main vertebrate line? Synchrotron scanning and a 100-million- year-old fossil point to the former
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 03
    Text - t 23 158 Matt Wood @woodtang Jan 21 When threatened, they can turn about 20 liters of water around them into slime
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 04
    Text - t 26 122 Matt Wood @woodtang Jan 21 When a fossil story gives you a reason to use the phrase "shark-choking slop," you just don't pass it up
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 05
    Text - t 12 53 Matt Wood @woodtang Jan 21 Things I learned about hagfish while I was writing this story:
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 06
    Text - 9 91 Matt Wood @woodtang Jan 21 That slime is filled with fibers of keratin, the same stuff that's in your fingernails
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 07
    Vehicle - Matt Wood Follow @woodtang If a truck dumps a bunch of them on a Prius, it looks like this
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 08
    Text - t672 2.3K Ed Yong @edyong209 Jan 23 Me to my colleagues: "So, I'm pretty interested in hagfish slime." Me, a few hours later: "I was unprepared for just how much hagfish news there is out there."
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 09
    Text - t6 41 wilsonosaurus @wilsonosaurus Jan 23 So many great things in this hagfish piece, including this: "The same traveling knots ... also help them eat. They grab into a cadaver, then move a knot from tail to head, using the leverage to yank out mouthfuls of meat."
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 10
    Text - t298 769 The Atlantic A @TheAtlantic Jan 23 Hagfish slime is one of nature's more wondrous substances, unlike anything else that's been concocted by either evolution or engineers, @edyong209 writes:
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 11
    Text - t7 26 Tornado Brother @bro_tornado Jan 23 "...hagfish aren't primitive evolutionary throwbacks at all Instead, they represent a lineage of vertebrates that diverged from all the others about 550 million years ago, and lost several traits such as complex eyes...and perhaps even bones."
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 12
    Text - t 30 204 Mayisha Zeb Nakib @MayishaZebNakib 22h "Hagfish produce slime the way humans produce opinions- readily, swiftly, defensively, and prodigiously"
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 13
    Text - t 7 61 Lieutenant BaconWaffles @likalaruku 21h "Hagfish burrow into corpses. They can't bite; instead, they rasp away at carcasses with a plate of toothy cartilage. They are effectively a large gut, and even that is understating matters: Their skin is actually more efficient at absorbing nutrients than their own intestines."
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 14
    Text - t6 51 Field Commander Dissident @Cognidissident 22h I look forward to Hagfish Man joining the Marvel roster.
    via uchicagomedicine
  • 15
    Text - Amanda Quraishi t 8 67 @ImTheQ. Jan 23 Hagfish is gonna be my new go-to insult.
    via uchicagomedicine

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