DETROIT \u2013 The remains of whales have been found in Michigan. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s not a hoax. It\u2019s not a joke. And I\u2019m not talking about the Basilosaurus that lived here 37 million years ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n Much more recently. Not the ancient ancestors of whales, but species that are still around in the oceans today. They just happened to live here just a few thousand years ago.<\/p>\n Whale remains scattered across Michigan<\/p>\n The skeletal remains of a baleen whale were found in Ortonville<\/a>. Sperm whale remains have turned up in both Lenawee County and Wexford County. A bowhead whale was discovered in 1927 while workers were digging a foundation for a schoolhouse in Oscoda. Finback whale remains have been found in Genesee County<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMany whale bones and teeth continue to turn up in Michigan,\u201d wrote Dr. J. Alan Holman<\/a>, former professor of geological sciences and zoology and emeritus curator of vertebrate paleontology at Michigan State University. \u201cSperm whale teeth have been found by people walking Michigan beaches.\u201d<\/p>\n OK, so how, why<\/p>\n To understand how whales ended up in the Great Lakes State, it helps to understand Michigan\u2019s history. It involves a lot of water, full disclosure.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s jump in.<\/p>\n Michigan spent millions of years either submerged underwater or buried under ice. That\u2019s why the state has no dinosaur fossils, and it\u2019s also why Petoskey stones are found along its shorelines. <\/p>\n Marine fossils are so common in Michigan that our state rock is a fossil. We\u2019re the only state whose official state rock is a fossil, by the way.<\/p>\n The last glacial period ended roughly 12,000 years ago. As the glaciers began to melt, an unfathomable volume of water moved southward.<\/p>\n Just, like, so much water<\/p>\n With the Rocky Mountains to the west and the Appalachian Mountains to the east, south was basically the only direction the water could go.<\/p>\n Just to reiterate what an incomprehensible amount of water this was: Michigan was once buried under a mile of ice<\/a>.<\/p>\n There was so much water that the Mississippi River was five miles wide at some points.<\/p>\n This allowed marine animals like whales to travel far inland. Whales are mammals and warm-blooded, so this massive cold freshwater highway to Michigan was viable for them in a way that it wasn\u2019t for sharks.<\/p>\n Related: The great white sharks-in-the-Great-Lakes post is wrong. Here\u2019s why it\u2019s not even close<\/a><\/p>\n The precursors to the Great Lakes had abundant marine life that you wouldn\u2019t expect. The remains of a walrus were once found on Mackinac Island<\/a>.<\/p>\n Why we\u2019re no longer underwater<\/p>\n Eventually, as the ice retreated far enough north, the water found a new path — flowing east rather than south. Nearly every Great Lake\u2019s water was redirected in that new direction.<\/p>\n This is also why whale remains have been found in the once 6th Great Lake<\/a>, Lake Champlain.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a shame. Whale watching on Lake Michigan or Huron sounds awesome.<\/p>\n But what if they were planted?<\/p>\n Not everyone has been convinced that the whale bones are genuine and that it\u2019s an elaborate hoax. The idea is that hundreds of years ago, people just took whale bones from coastal areas and just took them to Michigan like a bored teen stealing a traffic cone.<\/p>\n We all did that, right? It’s not just my high school friends, right? (Pixabay)<\/p>\n Dr. Claude W. Hibbard, a former University of Michigan geology professor and widely renowned paleontologist, had a pretty sharp response to that theory<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIf such is the case, the Indians, or the settlers, possessed a good knowledge of the prehistoric Wisconsin lake beaches in which to bury their discarded whale bones.\u201d<\/p>\n Sick archeological burn, Hibbie.<\/p>\n In other words, the bones were found in exactly the geological layers where you\u2019d expect them to be. They were not randomly buried but were found in places that are consistent with the glacial timeline and geographical history of Michigan.<\/p>\n