Alexander Omar Vargas Milne was born 1977 in Auckland, New Zealand, but has lived most of his life in Santiago, Chile. He studied biology at the University of Chile, where he became interested in evolutionary developmental biology. For his PhD, he decided to study embryos of birds as a key to understand their evolution from dinosaurs. He carried out postdoctoral research at University of Wisconsin and Yale before founding in 2008 the Ontogeny and Phylogeny Lab at the University of Chile. Along with students and collaborators, he has made several contributions on the nascent topic of dinosaur-bird evo-devo. He has also contributed to the re-foundation of vertebrate paleontology in Chile.