Dr. Leon Claessens is Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution at Maastricht University, and Dean of the Maastricht Science Programme. He is an expert on the evolution of archosaurs and the recently extinct dodo. Claessens has been appointed in Maastricht since January 2019, prior to which he worked in North America, where he spent more than two decades at Harvard University, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology and the College of the Holy Cross. He is also a curatorial affiliate of the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. Claessens originally hails from Limburg and is enthusiastic about the opportunity to develop a programme in Vertebrate Paleontology at one of the youngest universities in the Netherlands, in one of the most important classic localities for the study of Earth History.