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Michel Laurin

Canadian paleontologist and phylogenetic taxonomist

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 21, 2026
Entity authorityQ6836454
Source-derived summary

Michel Laurin is a Canadian-born French vertebrate paleontologist whose specialities include the emergence of a land-based lifestyle among vertebrates, the evolution of body size and the origin and phylogeny of lissamphibians. He has also made important contributions to the literature on phylogenetic nomenclature.

As an undergraduate, he worked in the laboratory of Robert L. Carroll and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto under the direction of Robert R. Reisz; his thesis concerned the osteology of seymouriamorphs. His 1991 review of diapsid phylogeny provided the broadest review of the subject up to that date. In 1995, Laurin and Reisz coauthored a widely cited article providing evidence that the synapsids are the sister group of all other amniotes. He later worked on untangling the phylogeny of the Stegocephalia, a group with a notoriously difficult phylogeny. He later moved to France; since 1998, he has been a CNRS researcher at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.

He is an editor-in-chief of Comptes Rendus Palevol, a journal in the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences family, as well as being a reviewing editor for the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. He has been a key contributor to the International Society for Phylogenetic Nomenclature, where he served as president 2008–2009 and as secretary 2010–2011.

Editorial summary

“Michel Laurin” enters the record as canadian paleontologist and phylogenetic taxonomist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Michel, Laurin and Canadian can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1991, 1995, 1998, 2008—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1965-10-26. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Michel, Laurin and Canadian.
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“Michel Laurin” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Michel, Laurin and Canadian provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6836454. VIAF identifies the subject as 105760132. The Library of Congress control number is no99014300. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991, 1995, 1998 and 2008.

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This entry incorporates text from Michel Laurin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.