Umbilical cord from the offspring. The cord along with the placenta is often eaten by the mother, to provide nourishment and to dispose of tissues that would otherwise attract scavengers or predators. In chimpanzees, the mother leaves the cord in place and nurses her young with the cord and placenta attached until the cord dries out and separates naturally, within a day of birth, at which time the cord is discarded. (This was first documented by zoologists in the wild in 1974.) Some species of shark — hammerheads, requiems and smooth-hounds — are viviparous and have an umbilical cord attached to their
The Pregnant Widow The Pregnant Widow The Pregnant Widow is a novel by the English writer Martin Amis, published by Jonathan Cape on 4 February 2010. Its theme is the feminist revolution, which Amis sees as incomplete and bewildering for women, echoing the view of the 19th-century Russian writer, Alexander Herzen, that revolution is "a long night of chaos and desolation". The "pregnant widow", a phrase taken from Herzen's "From the other shore" (1848–1850), is the point at which the old order has given way, the new one not yet born. Amis said in 2007 that "consciousness is not revolutionised by the snap