When the Whale Lost Its Teeth

Genesis 1:21

“And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”

Whalebone was used for all sorts of ornaments and structural purposes as a gently bendable, yet firm material. Today it has been replaced by plastics. But it wasn’t really bone. It came from the mouth of the whale. The structure is known today as baleen, and it is made of keratin, like your fingernails. The whale swallows huge quantities of water, then spits it out, sieving it through the baleen to catch the small krill organisms on which the baleen whale thrives.

Evolutionists have to believe that this baleen evolved, as they believe that the ancestors of the whale had teeth – as do non-baleen whales today. A recent article on one popular-style science website stated that “rivaling the evolution of feathers in dinosaurs, one of the most extraordinary transformations in the history of life was the evolution of baleen.” The comparison is appropriate. We have remarked many times on the sheer impossibility of the evolution of feathers, and so it is with the evolution of baleen.

The difficulty for evolutionists is working out a possible mechanism for the imaginary intermediate forms. Would the intermediate have had both teeth and baleen, or would there have had to be creatures with neither teeth nor baleen? If the latter, would those animals not have starved to death?

As is usual, it makes more sense to suppose that God designed baleen whales exactly as they needed to be so that they can live successfully in the oceans. Author: Paul F. Taylor

Prayer: When we see the large, magnificent creatures of the ocean that You made, Lord, our mouths are stopped, except to praise Your Name. Amen.

Ref: Smithsonian. “Whales lost their teeth before evolving hair-like baleen in their mouths: Newly described fossil whale in museum collections reveals a surprising intermediate step in their evolution.” ScienceDaily, 29 November 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181129142423.htm>. Image: Whit Wells, CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported.