Jean-Sébastien Steyer

Biography

Jean-Sébastien Steyer has a PhD in paleontology, is a researcher at the CNRS and is attached to the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. He is one of the few specialists studying life on Earth before the dinosaurs. He has also been working on reconstructions of extinct species for almost twenty years. The author of numerous scientific articles, this enthusiastic popularizer regularly publishes works that are rapidly becoming benchmarks, such as La Terre avant les dinosaures (2009), Exquise planète (2014), and Demain, les animaux du futur (2015). Between paleontological expeditions to the four corners of the globe, he is also a science columnist for the magazines Pour la science and Espèces.

Conference: Do fossils bear witness to evolution?

Fossils are the remains of organisms that lived on Earth in the past: skeletons, shells, leaves, tree trunks, footprints, excrement, burrows… These natural “time capsules” come from a variety of sources and are the objects of study for paleontologists. Often fragmentary and mineralized in rocks, these remains are sometimes exceptionally well preserved, as in amber or permafrost. Whatever their condition, fossils help us to better understand the evolution of environments and climates over geological time. But how much speculation is involved when fossils are highly fragmentary? And what contribution do fossils make to the study of kinship relationships?