Alexandre Demers-Potvin

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Post-doctoral Researcher at McGill University

An understanding of local and regional climate trends is essential to investigate the remarkable angiosperm radiation that happened during the Albian–Cenomanian transition. However, many of the inland depositional environments pioneered by the first modern angiosperms are poorly represented in the fossil record. Eastern Canada, in particular, has a...

We report the discovery of Maculaferrum blaisi gen. et sp. nov, the first occurrence of the family Tettigarctidae, infor- mally known as hairy cicadas, in North America. Maculaferrum blaisi is part of a new collection assembled during recent fieldwork in the Redmond Formation, Labrador, Canada, near Schefferville. It consists in a single isolated f...

Late Campanian terrestrial communities of western Canada are best known from the fluvial–paralic deposits of the Dinosaur Park Formation (DPF) in Dinosaur Provincial Park (DPP), Alberta. However, a growing list of localities from isolated DPF outcrops, outside of the DPP area, offers a glimpse into palaeocommunities that evolved isochronously with...

Three new fossil mayfly (Ephemeroptera) larvae from the Redmond Formation (Cenomanian) of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, are described: Alatuscapillus icarus gen. et sp. nov. (family Oligoneuriidae), Cruscolli sheppardae gen. et sp. nov. (family Heptageniidae), and Protoligoneuria borealis sp. nov. (family Hexagenitidae). This discovery marks t...

Over the last three decades, network theory has been increasingly applied to ecological research, partly because of the possibility it raises to account for species’ interactions in biodiversity measurements. So far, its application to palaeoecology has largely been limited to reconstructing food webs of Palaeozoic and Cenozoic communitieswith exce...

The body size, feeding morphology, energy requirements, and ontogenetic history of a predator at the top of its community’s food chains have long been known to affect its prey selection as well as the shape of its community’s trophic pyramid through biomass distributions. Together, these traits offer strong baselines to assess an ecosystem’s stabil...

Until the advent of phylogenomics, the atypical morphology of extant representatives of the insect orders Grylloblattodea (ice‐crawlers) and Mantophasmatodea (gladiators) had confounding effects on efforts to resolve their placement within Polyneoptera. This recent research has unequivocally shown that these species‐poor groups are closely related...

Champsosaurus fue un género de reptiles euroamericanos que existió desde el Cretácico hasta el Paleógeno. A pesar de su gran similitud morfológica con los crocodilianos, en particular el gavial moderno (Gavialis gangeticus), pertenecía al grupo de los neochoristoderos, sin una relación cercana con los primeros. Esta semejanza morfológica sorprenden...

Support jackets are an essential part of the fossil conservation and curation process, of which many approaches have been developed. Of these, the most common is the use of Plaster of Paris. Unfortunately, this plaster method can be time-consuming, messy, costly, and sometimes risky for more fragile specimens. Here, we present a novel methodology t...

Dinosaur Provincial Park constitutes an ideal study system to investigate the evolution of an extinct community through time, yet a precise correlation of fossil quarries across all its exposures remains elusive due to the lack of continuity of several sedimentary horizons. If we had a greater overview of the Park’s stratigraphic sequence with aeri...

This study presents the first dinosaur tracksite from the Paja Formation of Villa de Leyva (Boyacá, Colombia). A trackway on a single level was identified within an upper Hauterivian unit of the formation and includes nine well-preserved tridactyl footprints with theropod morphology. The estimated relative speed of the theropod trackmaker is associ...

Following six years of excavations in a bonebed located in the easternmost exposure of the Dinosaur Park Formation in Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park, we present the first Centrosaurus specimens found in Saskatchewan with diagnostic characters for that ceratopsid genus. This find thus expands the observed palaeogeographical distribution of Cen...

This paper represents the first time that I propose to correlate all fossil quarries of Dinosaur Provincial Park by identifying marker beds from a combination of 3D models, digital elevation models and orthomosaics of the badlands landscape of this famous fossil locality, with the raw images all obtained from drone flights that I lead with my crew...

The extremely derived morphology and behaviour of extant praying mantises combined with a scarce record of fossil relatives introduce significant challenges to tracing their evolution from Palaeozoic stem‐dictyopterans. Extant members of Chaeteessidae, Mantoididae and Metallyticidae could be invaluable to resolving the mantodean tree, yet their inc...

Preliminary results of a biomechanical comparison of two elasmosaurid plesiosaurs based on surface scans of each skeleton performed at the Centro de Investigaciones Paleontológicas (Villa de Leyva, Colombia) and at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (Regina, Saskatchewan)