Back to the Sea: The Evolution of Whales, an updated, permanent exhibit at the Exhibit Museum of Natural History, presents the story of how the mammals evolved from typical land dwellers to creatures that spend their lives in the sea.
The exhibit showcases decades of research spearheaded by U-M paleontologist Philip Gingerich. Since the 1980s, Gingerich and colleagues have located and mapped remains of more than a thousand whales in an area of the Egyptian desert known as Wadi Al-Hitan (Valley of the Whales), now a UNESCO World Heritage site. This area was underwater 37 million years ago, when whales, sea cows and other marine animals called it home.
The exhibit also features discoveries from Gingerich’s field work in Pakistan.
“We worked with Professor Gingerich to create an exhibit on whale evolution in 1997, and since then he has made new discoveries that we’re pleased to be able to include in the new exhibit,” says Amy Harris, museum director. “We’re delighted to have the opportunity to update this exhibit and add more material from Professor Gingerich’s work, because once again we’ll have here at the University of Michigan one of the world’s most up-to-date and complete exhibits on whale evolution.”
“Science is about trying to solve mysteries, trying to elucidate things we don’t understand — in my case, life in the past,” says Gingerich, director of the U-M Museum of Paleontology and the Ermine Cowles Case Collegiate Professor of Paleontology.
Highlights of the exhibit include a 50-foot-long skeleton of Basilosaurus isis, a long, snake-like creature that was the largest whale of its time (37 million years ago); and a skeleton of Dorudon atrox, which lived around the same time as Basilosaurus but is shaped much more like modern whales.
For more information go to the museum website at www.lsa.umich.edu/exhibitmuseum.
