About
I am a Belgian vertebrate palaeontologist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Unidad Ejecutora Lillo in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina. My work focuses on different aspects of the evolution of dinosaurs and non-mammaliaform cynodonts such the evolution of their dentition and integuments. I am collaborating with numerous colleagues from around the globe and my research has been covered in many media outlets such as National Geographic, BBC, CNN, NBC, CBS, Discovery, The Gardian, IFLSciences, Independant, Sci-News, Daily Science, TVI24, RTBF, RTL TVI, LeMonde and Le Soir.
Childhood
Opening the National Geographic of August 1978 on dinosaurs in my parent's bedroom when I was a 6 or 7-year-old boy changed my life entirely. Roy Andersen's painting "Parade of Dinosaurs" (see image below) illustrating the diversity of dinosaurs from the three periods of the Mesozoic on a double page of the article "A New Look at Dinosaurs" by John H. Ostrom, marked me so vividly that I started developing a fascination for dinosaurs from that day on. This dinomania started a few years before Jurassic Park and when this blockbuster was released in 1993 (I was then 10 years old), all the children of my age had the same passion for dinosaurs. The major difference with them, however, was that this passion for dinosaurs and palaeontology would never leave me.
Although I knew a lot about dinosaurs from an early age, I learned that that there was a job consisting of studying dinosaurs only a few years later. I must have been 10 or 11 years old when a friend of mine revealed to me the job of palaeontologist in the yard of the shchool of our small village of Saint-Jean-Geest, Belgium. At that moment, I knew that I would become a palaeontologist working on dinosaurs in the future, an idea which would never leave me. This love for dinosaurs and palaeontology led me to collect everything I could find on dinosaurs (toys, books, articles, etc.) and to look for fossils in different places of Belgium, first with my grandfather then by myself. Interestingly, both my father and my maternal grandfather were already collecting fossils when they were younger, though none of them developed the same passion for palaeontology as me.
University
Given my strong intention to become a palaeontologist, I logically decided to get a solid background in sciences in secondary school. I, therefore, took the strongest courses in mathematics, physics and chemistry and followed a "special sciences", a seventh year in secondary school in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, to prepare students to a career in sciences at university. I then did a Licence in Geology (now equivalent to a Master) at the University of Liège, Belgium, for five years (2001-2006) where I followed all the optional classes in palaeontology the last year. In Summer 2005, I participated in a Belgo-Russian palaeontological expedition as the French-speaking ambassador, a three weeks expedition aimed to excavate dinosaurs bones on a site from the city of Blagoveshchensk, Eastern Siberia, Russia. During the last year of my licence in Geology, I had the pleasure to do my Licence thesis on the morphofunctional analysis of the spinosaurid quadrates. This research project was proposed by famous French palaeontologist Eric Buffetaut, a dinosaur palaeontologist I was admiring when I was a boy, based on four quadrate bones belonging to spinosaurid theropods from the Cenomanian (Upper Cretaceous) Kem Kem beds of Morocco. Because a good level of English is pivotal to write scientific articles, I then spent three months in Brisbane, Australia, in 2007 where I followed an Advanced level course in English at the University of Queensland. This course helped me to pass the IELTS test which is compulsory to study in an English-speaking university. I then did an MSc in Palaeobiology (2007-2008) at the University of Bristol, England, where I worked on the diversity and disparity in sauropodomorphs dinosaurs as part of my MSc thesis. This project, supervised by Emily Rayfield, Mark Young and Steve Brusatte (among others), helped me to learn important notions of macroevolution as well as disparity and diversity analyses.
PhD and Postdoc
After getting my MSc in Palaeobiology, I pursued my carreer in Portugal where I did a PhD in vertebrate palaeontology at the Universidad Nova de Liboa (2010-2015) under the supervion of Octávio Mateus. My PhD project was initially on the evolution of teeth and tooth-bearing bones in non-avian theropod dinosaurs but I concentrated my research on the anatomy and evolution of the dentition and quadrate in theropods. I also had the opportunity to work on cranial and dental material of embryos and adult individuals belonging to the megalosaurid theropod Torvosaurus, which I referred to the new species T. gurneyi. This research received particularly important media coverage given the fact that Torvosaurus gurneyi was (probably) the largest terrestrial predator from Europe. Doing my PhD thesis in the small city of Lourinhã, Portugal, also allowed me to look for fossils on the cliffs boarding the Atlantic Ocean whenever I wanted and to participate in field seasons in Lourinhã and Algarve almost every year.
Once I received my PhD diploma from the Universidad Nova de Lisboa, I spent three years (2015-2018) in South Africa as a postdoctoral fellow at the Evolutionary Studied Institute (ESI) of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg . My research project supervised by Jonah Choiniere and Fernando Abdala was on the dental evolution in theropod dinosaurs and gomphodont cynodonts using tools such as disparity, evolutionary rate and dental complexity analyses. I published at the ESI two monographs on the dental anatomy of theropods and early diverging gomphodonts and described a new traversodontid gomphodont from the Triassic of Namibia (photo). In 2019, I followed my supervisor Fernando Abdala in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, to pursue my research on the dental evolution in non-mammaliaform cynodonts and expand it to dinosaur integument as a "postdoctorando" at the Unidad Ejecutora Lillo (UEL) where I am hoping to get a permanent position.