When Jordan Young (BSc 2025 UTM) was 10, he watched experts from a University of Toronto Mississauga paleontology lab discuss a newly found dome-headed dinosaur on TV. He remembers announcing that it was probably a pachycephalosaur, and probably an herbivore.
His mother, a UTM alum, saw him correcting the news reporter and decided he should get in touch with the lab. They told him they wanted to see him back when he was older. Young traces the interest to a well-illustrated book he read in the third grade.
Back in the same lab
Last year he began a master’s degree in UTM’s paleontology department, helped by a School of Graduate Studies scholarship for outstanding Black and Indigenous graduate students. He is already planning a PhD, and says he is grateful to work in the lab he first visited as a kid.
His first lead-author paper, in Scientific Reports, looks at fossils with bite marks from predators and scavengers. The findings offer some of the earliest direct evidence of large land predators hunting sizable plant-eating animals, known as diadectes, earlier than previously documented.
He is now writing a second paper on skeletons from three juvenile diadectes from Texas. He is also a three-time recipient of an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award, and he volunteers at Royal Ontario Museum events, bringing fossils and modern animals for children to handle.
Young says he is among the first recognized Black Canadian paleontologists, which he calls a milestone in modern Canadian history. He hopes to open the path for others, and he has already invited one knowledgeable young visitor to see the lab.
Reported from Coming full circle: UTM grad Jordan Young is now a researcher at the lab he visited as a kid (U of T Alumni News, September 24, 2026).
More from the original reporting: alumni.utoronto.ca/news/coming-full-circle-utm-grad-jordan-young-now-researcher-lab-he-visited-kid