Principal Player:
An interview with veteran expedition member Hans Larsson
(interviewed by Gabrielle Lyon)

Standing at 6'0 (6'2") in his steel-toed boots with red laces) Hans' standard field gear includes a hard black felt hat with a wide brim (hand-carried item on the plane), a full metal awl with a florescent orange rubber handle, a large yellow Pelican case for cameras, a Nalgene bottle wrapped with a t-shirt to keep it cool (and held on with duct tape), and a pointed hard-rock hammer with an extra long handle (special order).

His favorite colors: purple and lime green. His favorite meal to cook: "anything spicy with garlic plus chili power and anything else."

Hans' Swedish-Canadian descent - combined with summer vacations spent crisscrossing the Canadian wilderness and a love for the outdoors and outdoor life instilled in him by his parents - give him a rugged, lumberjack quality that serves as a unique foil to his intellectual pursuits: Hans received his PhD from the University of Chicago in August, 2000 from the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy. His dissertation topic: "Ontogeny and Phylogeny of the Archosauriform Skeleton," which he summarizes as "an exploration of 250 million years of archosaur evolution and the development of living crocodiles - archosaurs being birds and everything in between including dinosaurs, and an amazing variety of other fossil reptiles."

At age 29 Hans is a veteran expedition member. As a testament to his seemingly limitless energy and strength, since 1993 the Nigeriennes of Agadez have referred to Hans Larsson as "Commando." The 1993 expedition - Hans' first as a member of a team led by Paul Sereno - will live in history as the expedition that almost didn't happen. After a three-week delay obtaining necessary paperwork and a long list of other complications, many team members left the field before the fieldwork began. It was a trial by fire for a team of young students. Hans was one of the core of people who stayed. He went on to be a member of other teams led by Sereno, including Morocco '95, Brazil '96, Argentina '96, and Niger '97.

I interviewed Hans Larsson over lunch on September 7, in the Blue D Land Rover in Camp 1. As we talk, Hans' hazel eyes are reddened from a dusty morning of excavation at a new crocodile site. His hands are sweat and glue encrusted and his shoulder length sandy blonde hair is scraggly from wind and dust. He is thoughtful as he speaks and often pauses before answering.

As someone who has been a team member with you on a number of expeditions, I can say from personal experience that you bring an enormous range of kinds of knowledge to the team - knot tying, vehicle maintenance, electrical know-how - to name a few. How did you develop such a range of skills?

I can't really say I developed them, and I haven't really been trained in anything in particular. My parents, especially my dad, was really keen on getting me into new situations and figuring out problems from scratch. He was really adamant I look at things in terms of seeing the problem and logically working through it. A lot of what we did as a family is part of it, too. We were always camping, we always did something out side, canoeing, hiking. I can think of only two or three times when the family went to a hotel. Plus, growing up in fairly rural Ontario, my neighbor was about a kilometer away and everyone was a farmer.

During my childhood I spent a lot of time working for different farmers, driving tractors, fixing farming equipment, bailing hay, mucking manure out of barns. I really enjoyed driving the heavy equipment and that was really fun. If I had to divide it up somehow I'd have to say my mom was really the driving force for the outdoor experiences and my dad was the driving force behind my intellectual development.

What first led you to paleontology?

When I was five years old I was completely fascinated by these animals called dinosaurs, as are all kids at that age. My parents - and a bunch of really good teachers - fed me as much information as I wanted. I basically never stopped asking for information. When I was too little and couldn't read things, my mom, instead of reading bedtime stories or poetry, would read me books about dinosaurs. Then, when I was fourteen I got to meet one of the most prominent dinosaur paleontologists in Canada, the world, really, Phil Currie. He encouraged me to go to University and to keep up with my sciences and biology. Right after that I started applying to volunteer for the field work program at Dinosaur Provincial Park with the Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontololgy. But it had an 18-year old lower limit. So I didn't get in for the first years I tried, but when I was 17 I finally got in. Up to that point I spent a lot of time collecting rocks - big rocks , trilobites, fossils snails along Lake Ontario, which was about half an hour from my house. There are still some of those big rocks around the house. I also collected a lot of road kill - nasty dead animals I found along the road that had been killed by cars. It was always a battle with my mom over how much - and what - I could keep in the freezer. I liked bones, I liked the anatomy, even though I was too young to know about it. I liked looking at animal anatomy. I would do a lot of drawing of what I found. And whenever I went to the museum I would draw the animals that were stuffed, the skeletons that were mounted, the fossils.

You've spoken a lot about being interested in animals, skeletons and embryos - Why not be a biologist - why be a paleontologist?

The biggest rush I get from paleontology is that it goes into deep time and explores things in ways that no other science can explore. Paleo [ntology] is not just about dinosaurs - paleo is one of the few sciences that is historical on the order of billions of years. It offers a chance to grasp an understanding of how life has become the way we see it now. We know things started off simply - single cells and even simpler. But how did we get here? How do elephants get here? We can ask these things in a religious way, or we can ask them in a scientifically testable way and that's what paleontology does.

What do you value most about the expeditions you've been part of?

There are a few things in particular. Apart from the science - and there's so much to be learned about the science here - there is something expeditions in these kinds of environments really requires: incredible teamsmanship. What that means to me is that everyone pulls as much weight as they can. It's not a greedy expedition for people; it's an all-giving kind of affair. Everyone puts forth all their effort - and it takes a tremendous amount of effort because we're in such extreme conditions. The team really keeps a sense of the big goals and has unwavering enthusiasm. I like it. I like it a lot. And it's encouraging for me personally because the more I work, the more people around me work. It snowballs into a very productive environment. In these environments - if you have no water you not only can't work, you can't survive, you can't be here. These expeditions are really a different style than what you'd do in Canada. They're harsher compared to anything we can think of in North America. Here, if a vehicle breaks down we can't call the nearest "mighty muffler." We have to fix it on the spot. If they all break down, it's a potentially life-threatening situation. That's what I mean by harshness. The other thing I value is the experience of being in places like Niger or Argentina or Morocco. I've always liked to travel and this is probably the most extreme way to travel. It puts you in a place where you're not actually a tourist, but rather a productive person doing something. I can't stand walking around cities and going into tourist shops. This is how I like to travel.

You were part of the 1993 and 1997 Expeditions to Niger. Why come again on this trip?

It's exciting on two fronts for me. On the one hand is the fauna, which I'm starting to know better - especially the crocodile fauna, which I have a better understanding because of my PhD. The theropod (carnivorous dinosaur) fauna is pretty exciting too. I have more invested in those two groups than any other here. This is possibly the last time I'm doing this as an expedition member and not an expedition leader.

If I could take anything away from these trips to my own expeditions, I would want to take away both the underlying ideas of having great research goals and having a team with the drive to function for three or four month in a place as harsh as this desert. As a personal goal, I really want to try and get a more thorough understanding of all there is to do on an expedition to make it work. I want to focus on what we are doing, how could we do it better. I also came because I wanted to contribute what I can back to Paul. He was a big reason for me going to grad school, doing a PhD, and this is a kind of thank you. The other reason I came is I wanted a vacation before my career starts.

What do you see your role as with this team?

I like to think of myself as someone who keeps things on track; not really leading, but helping to guide. I like to see myself as someone who influences people's decisions, in a small or large way. But I try to do it in a way where I'm not coming across as a leader. I don't like to deal with leader vs. non-leader demarcations.

What kind of role has Paul played in your development as a scientist?

A really important role Paul has played is to make me defend my ideas. He doesn't take things for granted and so he gives me a sounding board, even if he doesn't accept my ideas. He has helped my professionalism because he challenges the work I do. As a scientist you need that to make your ideas stronger or to change them if you think you're doing the wrong thing.

You've been at Camp 1 for less than a week, but you're already hard at work excavating a new site. Tell me a little bit about it.

This site is particularly interesting because it preserves a good part of a huge crocodile called Sarcosuchus. The animal has been known for a while, but all that's been described is a skull. The only thing that's been written about it is a three-page paper with a small photo of the back of the skull. Our team has uncovered 8 or 9 good skulls of different sizes ranging from juvenile to adult. The site we're working on right now not only has a nice skull, it preserves at least a part of a skeleton. We're finding more and more bones everyday. Each one we find is really important because of the lack of material and so the more we find, the more exciting the site becomes. Eventually I want to re-describe this animal with the new information.

You completed your doctorate literally days before you departed for Niger. What awaits you after the expedition?

I've got a post-doctorate position at Yale University. Eventually I'd love to have my ideal job: something that combines classical paleontology - the chance to do field work, fossil descriptions, research, fossil curation - and to head up a program focused in comparative embryology. It comes back to first principles. I ask myself over and over what good is it to study dinosaurs? Or fossils in general?

What I'm interested in, in a broad sense, is incorporating modern data of developmental biology with paleontological data to look for patterns in development and evolution of animal anatomy. My hope is that patterns could be used by other people in other fields - like comparative anatomy, or systematics even. I'm not sure what I'm doing now is helping anything, but I'm fascinated by the complexities of how an animal can evolve and how its development can change over time.