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Denis Geraads (born December 27 1951 in Paris) is a French palaeoanthropologist and palaeontologist.

Career
Geraads received the Diplôme national de doctorat at the Paris-Sorbonne University in 1974 with the thesis Les Giraffidés du Miocène supérieur de la région de Théssalonique (Grèce). From 1976 to 1978 he was an assistant professor at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, and in 1978 he became a full-time researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), where he is now director emeritus of research. Geraads is considered an expert on Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene faunas from hominid sites, mainly from the Mediterranean area and Africa. His findings have been published in more than 200 scientific articles. He was involved in a number of research papers based on field research.

From 1974, Geraads conducted research in Greece, where he worked with Louis de Bonis (from the University of Poitiers) and George D. Koufos (from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and collaborated on numerous field studies. His team worked on sites in northern Greece that have a very rich Late Miocene mammal fauna, including the primates Ouranopithecus and Graecopithecus.

Also beginning in 1974, Geraads first became involved in the study of the faunas of the archaeological sites of Melka Kunturé, Ethiopia, where he collaborated with several international teams. Around 1995, he began excavations in the late Miocene sites of Ch'orora, collecting important fossils of rodents and other mammals. From the same year, he worked with Zeresenay Alemseged at the paleontological sites of Asbole and Dikika, right near the Afar Triangle, where the Australopithecus skeleton Lucy has been discovered. In addition to a rich mammalian fauna, Alemseged's team discovered the skeleton of an Australopithecus baby, nicknamed Selam and the earliest known hominid cut marks. Since 2012, Geraads' team has been investigating outcrops from the late Pliocene a little further north in the Mille-Logya area.