User:Michel Laurin

I am a vertebrate paleontologist and systematist. My original specialty was Paleozoic limbed vertebrates (tetrapods or stegocephalians, depending on which nomenclature you use). I followed Robert L. Carroll's vertebrate paleontology course (at McGill University) as an undergraduate, worked a couple of summers in his lab as an undergraduate student, and moved on to the University of Toronto to do my Master's and PhD under the supervision of Robert R. Reisz. After this started my years of postdoctoral wanderings, while I was looking for a real job. I first spent a couple of years as a postdoctoral fellow in Kevin Padian's lab at the University of California, Berkeley campus. I then left for Europe, where I have been ever since, first to teach a year in the Paris Diderot University, then to spend a year in Hans-Peter's laboratory in the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. Only after all this did I secure a tenure-track position in the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), for which I have been working ever since. As a CNRS research scientist, I have had the opportunity of working in two research groups. The first (chronologically) focused on bone histology and microanatomy, which were new fields for me. It is there that I got interested in paleobiology, initially through the influence of Armand de Ricqlès, and later, of Vivian de Buffrénil. For my paleobiological research, I quickly found out that my previous mathematical and statistical training was grossly insufficient, so I learned a bit about this (but not as much as I would have liked), partly through the influence of Marc Girondot. And of course, in that group, I learned a lot about bone histology in general, especially through interactions with Louise Zylberberg, François Meunier, Jacques Castanet, and Jean-Yves Sire (people who apparently don't have biographical pages on Wikipedia but probably should; perhaps I will try to fix this, someday). Then, though some weird but chronic war between the presidency of the Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University and the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, I migrated to a paleontology research group (UMR 7207), in which I currently work, and in good company, I might add. When I migrated to the Muséum, that group was led by Sevket Sen, and later on, by Philippe Janvier, which some of you probably heard about (long before you heard about me, because if you didn't, you wouldn't be here...). In fact, this is the second or third largest team of paleontologists in the world (the first one or possibly two being in China), so it will come as no surprise that other paleontologists that you may have heard about work there as well, such as Jean-Claude Rage, Sevket Sen, Pascal Tassy, Martin Pickford and Brigitte Senut. I served on the councils of various academic societies, such as the Société Française de Systématique, the Association Paléontologique Française (President for 2012-2013), and the International Society for Phylogenetic Nomenclature, where I have served both as Secretary (2004–2007; 2010–2023) and President (2007–2010). I started contributing to Wikipedia in April 2011) and I edit pages here occasionally, so I apologise if several of my contributions include technical errors. You are more than welcome to fix them for me. I hope to help improve Wikipedia, especially by incorporating findings of recent works, along with the relevant references. I fortunately have other editorial experience, especially with the Comptes Rendus Palevol, for which I have been serving as Chief Editor since 2011, along with Philippe Taquet. For more information about my work, feel free to look at my home page, or for a third-party perspective, just look at the Wikipedia biography for Michel Laurin, to which I did not contribute (of course). For my books, see my Amazon author page.