Philip Gingerich visit
PBK Alpha of Oregon will host Philip Gingerich as a PBK Visiting Scholar from Thursday April 30 through Saturday May 2, 2009.
Philip Gingerich is Case Collegiate Professor of Paleontology, professor of geological sciences, and director of the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan. His research involves the origin of modern orders of mammals, and quantitative approaches to paleobiology and evolution. Fieldwork has been carried out primarily in the deserts of Pakistan and Egypt, where he and his research team discovered skeletons linking whales to land mammals. Read more about him here.
Schedule of events
The highlight of Gingerich’s visit will be a public lecture on Thursday April 30 from 7:30 to 9:30 in 180 PLC on “The Origin and Early Evolution of Whales: A Profound Transition from Land to Sea” (see inset box)
Gingerich will also be visiting undergraduate courses and meeting with students and faculty.
Watch this space for more details as the visit approaches.
The Origin and Early Evolution of Whales: A Profound Transition from Land to Sea
(Thu. Apr. 30, 7:30-9:30pm, 180 PLC, UO campus)
Gingerich and his colleagues have shown that the ancestors of todays's whales once had legs, walked on land, and even gave birth on land before returning to the sea. Whales eventually evolved from land creatures into sea creatures, reversing our normal expectation that sea creatures migrated to land never to return. These findings illustrate a fascinating deeper point about the way evolution works: that it's not a directional or progressive process, but instead occurs opportunistically, as species change in unpredictable ways over the eons.