John Solum

On Tuesday, March 4 at 4:10 PM Phil Gingerich will be giving a talk titled "Origin of Whales." You can find more information here:

http://www.geo.lsa.umich.edu/

For those unfamiliar with him, Gingerich and his students have discovered a lot of the fossils of early whales in Pakistan and Egypt. In 2000 Gingerich and a grad student named Iyad Zalmout found a skeleton of an animal they named Artiocetus due to the resemblance of its ankle to the ankle of artiodactyls. Hopefully he'll be talking a bit more about that.

John

Secular Pinoy

Sounds interesting, but I'm half a world away.

Phil Gingerich is prominently featured in Carl Zimmer's book At the Water's Edge and in the PBS Documentary Evolution, in the episode "Great Transformations." He's also one of a number of paleontologists who do not subscribe to the Punctuationist school of thought.

Writer@Large

I'm about 2 hours away, but I'm on campus until late afternoon so I could never make it on time. But that does sound fascinating.

--W@L

Selsaral

Ah excellent. I studied paleontology as an undergrad at EMU, and we visited the UoM museum and department several times. Their recent work on whales was always a big topic of discussion.