Octávio Mateus
Quick Facts
Biography
Octávio Mateus (born 1975) is a Portuguese dinosaur paleontologist and biologist Professor of Paleontology at the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He graduated in Universidade de Évora and received his PhD at Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 2005. He collaborates with Museu da Lourinhã, known for their dinosaur collection.
A student of Miguel Telles Antunes, he is a specialist in dinosaurs, having studied Late Jurassic dinosaurs of Portugal.
He has named new dinosaur species such as Lourinhanosaurus antunesi (1998), Dinheirosaurus lourinhanensis, Tangvayosaurus hoffeti (1999), Draconyx loureiroi (2001), Lusotitan atalaiensis (2003), Europasaurus holgeri (2006), and Allosaurus europaeus (2006), Torvosaurus gurneyi Hendrickx & Mateus, 2014, and Galeamopus (2015)
Since 1991 Octávio Mateus has organized dinosaur excavations in Portugal, as well as excavating in Laos (Asian Southeast) with the French team of the Paris Museum of Natural History, led by Prof. Philippe Taquet. He has recently worked in Angola, where he discovered the first Angolan dinosaur in the scope of a project in the area of vertebrate paleontology of Angola. He collaborates with diverse international scientific institutions as the scientific council member of the German foundation Verein zur Förderung der niedersächsischen Paläontologie. He also studied dinosaur tracks and eggs, phytosaurs, chelonians, and whales. In 2012 he integrated an expedition to the Triassic of Greenland in Jameson Land.