Another Big Mistake in Evolution
by Frank Sherwin, D.Sc. (Hon.) | Sep. 18, 2025
The strange and wonderful coelacanth1 has long been a challenge to evolutionists.
The coelacanth has long been hailed as an ancestor to amphibians and other tetrapods as their lineage goes back a supposed 300 million years. However, the exact origin of coelacanths has never been established by evolutionary scientists, the fish just seem to appear in the rocks “suddenly” like most all fossil organisms. And modern coelacanths were also found to give birth to live young (like some sharks), unlike their supposed descendants, the amphibians.2
The living version of this “fossil”3 has recently surprised evolutionists.4 A significant portion of the cranial musculature of the “ancient” coelacanths was found to be wrong. By reanalyzing “the skull musculature of coelacanths, a group of fish that has existed for 400 million years, [researchers] concluded that many structures had been incorrectly described.”5
Evolutionists writing in Science Advances stated,
Despite being one of the most iconic living vertebrates, we found a plethora of errors in the identification of cranial muscles in the African coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae), some of which have been replicated for nearly 70 years. Given the key position of coelacanths in the vertebrate tree of life, correcting these errors has profound implications for understanding the early gnathostome evolution.6
Because of these glaring mistakes, it
means foundational assumptions about how vertebrates, including humans, evolved to eat and breathe may need to be rewritten. The discovery corrects decades of anatomical errors, reshapes the story of skull evolution, and brings unexpected insights into our own distant origins.5
Contradictions and misidentifications abound in this recent coelacanth discovery.
“There were many contradictions in the literature. When we finally got to examine the specimens, we detected more errors than we’d imagined. For example, 11 structures described as muscles were actually ligaments or other types of connective tissue. This has a drastic consequence for the functioning of the mouth and breathing, because muscles perform movement, while ligaments only transmit it,” [Datovo] explains.5
Aside from these errors, Science Daily also reported on the supposed implications for where coelacanths fit in evolution, “From images of the skull bones of other fish from completely extinct lineages, Datovo and Johnson were able to infer where the muscles found in coelacanths would fit, elucidating the evolution of these muscles in the first jawed vertebrates.”5 Not only is such an exercise subjective, but the first jawed vertebrates—evolutionarily speaking—have yet to be found.
The ancestral vertebrate (protovertebrate) has been sought for more than 100 years, and the likelihood of finding it today is not much greater than in the past. It can be assumed that the protovertebrate was small and soft-bodied, two factors that suggest the improbability of finding a fossilized form in a recognizable condition.7 (Emphasis added)
In their Science Advances article, Datovo and Johnson appeal to homology (which is a “controversial term”8) to make their case for connecting “coelacanth muscles with those of other jawed fishes.”6 But William Dembski and the late Jonathan Wells wrote in The Design of Life that
Neo-Darwinists continue to defend their conjunction of homology with common ancestry, whereas critics object that it confuses definition with explanation and leads to circular reasoning. The [late] philosopher of biology Ronald Brady, one of the more outspoken critics of neo-Darwinism in the last generation, observed, ‘By making our explanation into the condition to be explained, we express not scientific hypothesis but belief . . . Dogmatic endeavors of this kind must eventually leave the realm of science.’9
These incomplete evolutionary lineages and controversial explanations point to the bigger mistake that evolutionists believe: that the strange and unscientific vertebrate tree of life, as mentioned in the Science Daily5 and the Science Advances6 articles, is true even though it is only hypothetical.10 The nodes on the tree of life, places where there should be a common ancestor of two given species, are always empty. Indeed, Datovo and Johnson said,
It is currently impossible to indicate at which node of the sarcopterygian tree the attachment of the spiracularis [muscle] to the palatoquadrate [muscle] evolved. In any case, the presence of the spiracularis is probably primitive for gnathostomes, since acanthodians, placoderms, and some extinct agnathans apparently had functional spiracles.6 (Emphasis added)
W. Ford Doolittle is an evolutionary bioinformatics specialist, and he said that “the history of life cannot properly be represented as a tree.”11
Despite these objections to the tree of life and common ancestors, conventional scientists continue to assume evolution is fact and try to explain how it occurs and why it doesn’t happen when stasis is evident. The Science Daily article tried to explain the stasis in fossil and living coelacanths with slow changes of their genome: “One reason they have changed so little since the extinction of the dinosaurs is that they have few predators and live in a relatively protected environment. This has resulted in slow changes to their genome, as shown by a 2013 study published in the journal Nature.”5
But few predators and general environmental safety don’t adequately explain how little these fish have changed. ICR’s Brian Thomas addressed this.
A team led by German researchers from Ruhr-University Bochum published the first genetic population survey of these storied fishes in the journal Current Biology. They analyzed DNA sequences from 71 adult coelacanth fish.
The team analyzed the most variable region of the mitochondrial chromosome, the “d-loop.” After 400 million years, different fish populations should show significant differences, but only 8 of 726 coelacanth d-loop base pairs showed variation. Such a low number of differences is easily explained if coelacanth are only thousands of years old.4
Dr. Thomas went on to say, “To have only produced 8 out of 726 base pairs in mitochondrial DNA’s most highly variable region after 400 million supposed years would be a rate so ‘extremely slow’ that it defies credibility.”4
Yes, science is self-correcting, and humans—even evolutionists—are fallible. It was helpful for ichthyologists to discover that a substantial portion of the cranial musculature of the supposedly ancient coelacanths was wrong. But correcting these mistakes within the irrational evolutionary, deep-time paradigm will never lead zoologists to connect the dots within the gnathostomes (jawed vertebrates). The roadblocks include homology, the vertebrate tree of life, the lack of transitional forms, and the coelacanth genome. The coelacanth and other fish were created on Day 5, just thousands of years ago.
References
- Sherwin, F. Fossil Fish Finally Filmed. Creation Science Update. Posted on ICR.org May 19, 2025.
- Clarey, T. and J. Tomkins. Coelacanths: Evolutionists Still Fishing in Shallow Water. Creation Science Update. Posted on ICR.org April 29, 2013.
- Thomas, B. Should We Drop the Term ‘Living Fossil’? Creation Science Update. Posted on ICR.org July 18, 2016.
- Thomas, B. Lobe-Finned Fish Supplies Surprises. Creation Science Update. Posted on ICR.org August 24, 2012.
- 400-Million-Year-Old Fish Exposes Big Mistake in How We Understood Evolution. Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo. Posted on sciencedaily.com July 29, 2025.
- Datovo, A. and D. Johnson. 2025. Coelacanths Illuminate Deep-Time Evolution of Cranial Musculature in Jawed Vertebrates. Science Advances. 11 (18).
- Jollie, M. July 31, 2025. Evolution and Paleontology. Encyclopedia Britannica.
- Thain, M. and M. Hickman. 2004. Dictionary of Biology. London, UK: Penguin Books, 353.
- Wells, J. and W. Dembski. 2008. The Design of Life. Seattle, WA: Dallas Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 125.
- Tomkins, J. and J. Bergman. 2013. Incomplete Lineage Sorting and Other ‘Rogue’ Data Fell the Tree of Life. Journal of Creation. 27 (3): 84–92.
- Doolittle, W. 1999. Phylogenetic Classification and the Universal Tree. Science. 284 (5423): 2124–2129.
* Dr. Sherwin is a science news writer at the Institute for Creation Research. He earned an M.A. in invertebrate zoology from the University of Northern Colorado and received an honorary doctorate of science from Pensacola Christian College.
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