The King’s Association is delighted to announce the next lecture in the Enlightening Minds speaker series. We will welcome King's College London academic, Dr Aaron LeBlanc on Tuesday 5th May for his talk 'Dinosaurs, dentists, and dragons: where palaeontology and dentistry meet'.

The Enlightening Minds lecture series aims to nurture and ignite intellectual curiosity across the entire King’s community - including students, parents, governors, alumni, teachers, and partner schools. These lectures feature knowledgeable members of the broader King’s community, sharing insights related to their field of research or expertise in a topical subject. 

Though they may seem like different fields, palaeontology and dentistry have a lot in common when it comes to the study of teeth. This talk explores the quirky origins of dentistry and the study of dinosaurs in 19th century Britain before diving into the fascinating world of reptile teeth: from the tooth batteries of duck-billed dinosaurs, to the fearsome bite of tyrannosaurs, and the iron-coated teeth of Komodo dragons.

Dr LeBlanc is a Canadian-born palaeontologist who never lost his childhood fascination with dinosaurs and all things fossilised. After completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in palaeontology at the University of Alberta in his hometown of Edmonton, Canada, LeBlanc moved to the University of Toronto, Canada for a PhD. There he learned how to examine fossil teeth under the microscope and became obsessed with the study of teeth in living and extinct animals. He arrived at King’s College London in 2020 as a Marie Curie Fellow in the Faculty of Dentistry, Oral & Craniofacial Sciences and was appointed Lecturer in Dental Biosciences in 2023. Now his research lab works closely with dentists across the faculty and uses cutting-edge techniques to study the evolution, development, and function of teeth in mammals, reptiles, and fish.