David C. Evans (paleontologist)

David Christopher Evans is a Canadian palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist who specializes in the evolution and paleobiology of Cretaceous dinosaurs in western North America. He received his B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS) and a member of the Royal Society of Canada (The College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists) and currently serves as the Senior Curator and Temerty Chair of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. He is also a faculty member in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Evans is particularly renowned for his work on the paleobiology of hadrosaur ("duck-billed") dinosaurs and has conducted international research on a wide variety of paleontological topics.
Biography.
David Evans was born in Ontario and raised in Kelowna, British Columbia. He received his B.Sc. from the Integrated Sciences Program of the University of British Columbia in 2003, where he completed an undergraduate thesis on skull growth and variation in the hadrosaur "Corythosaurus". Over the course of his undergraduate degree, Evans worked as a field technician at the Royal Tyrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller. He then completed his Ph.D. in 2007 under the supervision of Canadian paleontologist Robert Reisz at the University of Toronto in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology on development and phylogenetic relationships of lambeosaurine hadrosaurs (dissertation title: "Ontogeny and evolution of lambeosaurine dinosaurs (Ornithischia: Hadrosauridae)."). Following the completion of his Ph.D., Evans was hired as a curator by the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, where he currently serves as the Temerty Chair in Vertebrate Palaeontology. He has been part of the faculty in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto since 2007 and currently holds the rank of Associate Professor. He is also the owner of a male Shiba Inu named Doug.
Academic contributions.
David Evans' research focuses primarily on the evolution and paleobiology of Late Cretaceous dinosaurs, particularly in North American ecosystems. He has published extensively on various aspects of hadrosaurs, following his undergraduate and doctoral dissertations, including phylogenetics, development, biostratigraphy, and anatomy. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed articles and has several publications in leading scientific journals, including Biological Reviews, Current Biology, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, and Science, and has contributed book chapters to several edited volumes. Evans' current research interests focus primarily on the vast majority of the well-known Late Cretaceous dinosaur clades found in western North America, and he maintains active fieldwork programs in Alberta and Montana. He has also conducted research on dinosaur material from Mongolia and tetrapod-bearing deposits in Sudan. Evans has also been involved with both fieldwork and research of the Early Jurassic sauropodomorph "Massospondylus" from South Africa and has conducted research on pelycosaurian-grade Permian synapsids, Permian temnospondyls, the iconic Pleistocene felid "Smilodon", and choristoderes.
Evans has been a part of various teams that have named over a dozen new genera or species of dinosaurs. New ceratopsians named by Evans and colleagues include "Xenoceratops foremostensis" Ryan, Evans, & Shepherd, 2012; "Gryphoceratops morrisoni" Ryan, Evans, Currie, Brown, & Brinkman, 2012; "Unescoceratops koppelhusi" Ryan, Evans, Currie, Brown, & Brinkman, 2012; "Mercuriceratops gemini" Ryan, Evans, Loewen, & Currie, 2014; "Wendiceratops pinhorensis" Evans & Ryan, 2015; "Spiclypeus shipporum" Mallon, Ott, Larson, Iuliano, & Evans, 2016; and "Ferrisaurus sustutensis" Arbour & Evans, 2019. Evans was also involved in the naming of the ornithopods "Albertadromeus syntarsus" Brown, Evans, Ryan, & Russell, 2013; "Plesiohadros djadokhtaensis" Tsogtbaatar, Weishampel, Evans, & Watabe, 2014; and "Gobihadros mongoliensis" Tsogtbaatar, Weishampel, Evans, & Watabe, 2019; the pachycephalosaurians "Acrotholus audeti" Evans, Schott, Larson, Brown, & Ryan, 2013; and "Foraminacephale brevis" Schott & Evans, 2016; the dromaeosaurid "Acheroraptor temertyorum" Evans, Currie, & Larson, 2013; the ankylosaurid "Zuul crurivastator" Arbour & Evans, 2017; and the troodontid "Albertavenator curriei" Evans, Cullen, Larson, & Rego, 2017. Evans has also been involved with the naming of various new non-dinosaurian taxa, such as the Devonian onychodontiform fish "Onychodus eriensis" Mann, Rudkin, Evans, & Laflamme, 2017; the Carboniferous parareptile "Erpetonyx arsenaultorum" Modesto, Scott, MacDougall, Sues, Evans, & Reisz, 2015; and the Cretaceous baenid turtle "Neurankylus lithographicus" Larson, Longrich, Evans, & Ryan, 2013.
As a professor at the University of Toronto, Evans supervises numerous graduate students in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. Former M.Sc. students include Arjan Mann (Carleton University); Ryan Schott (National Museum of Natural History); Chris McGarrity (Field Museum); and Collin Van Buren (Ohio State University). Former Ph.D. students include Nicolas Campione (University of New England); Caleb Brown (Royal Tyrell Museum); Kirstin Brink (University of Manitoba); Thomas Cullen (North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences); Mateusz Wosik (Misericordia University), and Kentaro Chiba (Okayama University of Science). Evans also serves on the editorial board of several academic journals, including FACETS and Biology Letters, and has previously served as an editor at PLOS ONE.
Outreach and public media.
Evans has been featured in numerous documentaries, including the History Channel's 2015 documentary "Dino Hunt Canada" and various episodes of Daily Planet and radio and TV interviews, as well as appeared in the TVOKids series "Dino Dan: Trek's Adventures". He has also helped to develop several exhibits, including the traveling "Ultimate Dinosaurs" exhibit in 2012, the permanent James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), and temporary exhibits at the ROM, including "Dinosaur Eggs & Babies: Remarkable Fossils from South Africa" (2014) and "Zuul, Life of an Armoured Dinosaur" (2018-2019). Evans has also served on numerous committees of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and the Canadian Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.