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At 80 degrees north latitude, well within the Arctic Circle, there is ice and wind and more dark than light. There also are polar bears. And, sometimes, there is Hans Larsson.

A paleontologist and professor at McGill University in Quebec, Canada, Larsson, PhD, says he prefers to research places where “people haven’t gone before, rather than refining what’s already known. I really want to make it a challenge.”

Part of the challenge at 80 degrees north is fending off polar bears. The unpredictable creatures differ greatly from bandits or military men running around in, say, the Sahara, Larsson said, mainly because “polar bears want to eat you.” Five members of Larsson’s laboratory typically join him on his trips north—a “magic number” that is large enough to deter the bears from wandering over and small enough to fit into a helicopter.

Because Larsson prefers to travel to less explored territories, he discovers fossils that no one else has seen yet. University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno, one of Larsson’s mentors from his time as a graduate student here, says that’s the way to do it. On his Web site, Sereno writes, “The trick to big fossil finds? You’ve got to be able to go where no one has gone before.”

On a recent trip to the Arctic, Larsson and his team did just that. They uncovered two new species of marine reptile, which Larsson referred to as a “Loch Ness monster type.” The species are so new in fact, that they’re not even named yet. All that Larsson and his team know so far is that the reptiles are part of the Plesiosaur family. While digging in the fertile but remote land of Niger, they discovered eight previously unknown dinosaurs and five new crocodile species.

The fossils Larsson finds, however, only tell one tiny piece of the world’s expansive history. He hopes to discover the rest of the story through his research in the flourishing experimental field of evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo.

Paleontology, Larsson said, is “essentially a collection-based science. That can be dissatisfying for people, including me.” Because paleontology typically doesn’t involve experimentation, some scientists consider it a “soft science,” according to Larsson.

But Larsson thinks otherwise. He points to how creatures moved from water to land and the dinosaur-to-bird transition as proof of the central role of fossils in evolutionary science. Over millennia, species across the globe underwent anatomical changes that turned fins into limbs and scales into feathers. “These are two very well-resolved, major evolutionary events filled with fossils,” Larsson said.

Contributing to that fossil collection is only one side of his research. The experimental side involves testing the developmental mechanisms responsible for those changes—genes and proteins that still exist in embryonic development, but that turn on and off in different ways, garnering modern results.

In his lab, Larsson runs experiments on embryos of modern animals such as chickens. He has found that birds, for example, have five fingers in early development. Only as their development progresses do they lose those fingers and gain more bird-specific characteristics.

Youth’s passion

At 5 years old, growing up in Alberta, Canada, Larsson likely never imagined he would one day be running experiments in which he injected chicken eggs with various proteins to see if he could make the embryo inside grow a dinosaur tail.
However, he did know from a young age that he wanted to collect fossils.

Like many children, Larsson was fascinated by dinosaurs. When that fascination kept growing, his parents and teachers supported him. He made regular trips to the Badlands in Alberta, wondering what other creatures could have walked over that land. He explored miles of hauntingly arid tan and brown rock formations that were once covered in wetlands. And at age 17, he worked his first of seven seasons at Alberta’s Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, then the largest in the world.

After finishing his bachelor’s degree at McGill, Larsson enrolled at the University of Chicago to earn his master’s degree and PhD in organismal biology and anatomy. His work at the Tyrrell Museum caught the attention of University of Chicago’s Sereno. “His flair for doing paleontology is so different. For better or worse, he does it in a very public-oriented and critical way,” Larsson said.

However, Larsson treads carefully in the public arena. “I have spoken with (Sereno) about this. Sometimes you can go overboard, and the downside is that your peers might think you’re not doing your job,” Larsson said.

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