HANS LARSSON
Expedition Team Member

Photo © Mike Hettwer, courtesy Project Exploration

Hans Larsson is associate professor at McGill University in Montreal and associate professor at the university’s Redpath Museum. He has a bachelor’s degree from McGill and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago; he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale in 2002.

Larsson has conducted field work in the Canadian High Arctic, western Canada and Colombia, recovering fossil plants and animals in an effort to document paleobiodiversity in poorly studied regions of the Americas.

Larsson began his research in the field of vertebrate paleontology and later expanded it to encompass experimental embryology. His current research works at the interface between developmental biology and vertebrate paleontology. Larsson’s lab focuses on two macroevolutionary transitions — the fish to amphibian and dinosaur to bird transitions. Both involve sequencing of genes implicated in the development of fins, limbs and tails, bioinformatics of the coding and regulatory regions of these genes, expression patterns of some of the genes in selected extant embryos, morphogenesis of the skeleton and other associated tissues in these embryos, and final integration of these genetic and developmental changes to the evolutionary rates and changes of the skeleton across each transition.

Larsson is the Canada Research Chair in Macroevolution, a competitive position. He has published three book chapters and leads a research program comprising six Ph.D. students and a postdoctoral fellow.