I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Philip Gingerich, a professor of paleontology at the University of Michigan and probably the world’s foremost expert on the evolution of whales, has found another early species of whale that tells us much about the habitat they lived in and their habits. Wired has the story:
Early whales hunted at sea but spent the rest of their time on land, suggest two newly-described fossil whales — one of them a pregnant female — believed to represent a transitional species between earth- and water-bound behemoths.
Dating from 47.5 million years ago, the whales had large teeth suited for consuming fish, and flipper-like limbs that could support their weight on land, albeit awkwardly. The fetal skeleton was positioned for head-first delivery, typically seen in land mammals. Modern whales give birth tail-first.
“They clearly were tied to the shore,” said study co-author Philip Gingerich, a University of Michigan paleontologist, in a press release. “They were living at the land-sea interface and going back and forth.”
Gingerich’s team dubbed the whales Maiacetus inuus. Maicetus means “mother whale,” and Inuus was a Roman fertility god.
Gingerich is responsible for discovering a number of early whale specimens that document the transition from land-dwelling mammals closely related to the ancestors of hippos to modern whales. The full paper can be read here.
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