Derek Briggs

Derek Ernest Gilmor Briggs (born 10 January 1950) is an Irish palaeontologist and taphonomist. He is the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor in the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Yale University and Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology and former Director of the Yale Peabody Museum. He went on to the University of Cambridge to work under British palaeontologist Harry Blackmore Whittington. He was awarded a PhD in 1976 on Arthropods from the Burgess Shale, Middle Cambrian, Canada.

Career Briggs taught at Goldsmiths, University of London for 8 years, followed by 17 years at Bristol University, before moving to Yale in 2003. While at the University of Cambridge, Briggs worked on the fossils of the Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia alongside a fellow student Simon Conway Morris, both under the supervision of Harry Whittington. The Burgess Shale project subsequently became one of the most celebrated endeavours in the field of palaeontology in the latter half of the 20th century. Briggs's work on the Cambrian radiation led to the first analysis of the relationships and morphological evolution of early arthropods, and the reconstruction of the giant predatory Anomalocaris from the Burgess Shale. He has used analyses of specimens and laboratory experiments to determine how soft tissues are fossilized through replication by minerals such as apatite and pyrite, and how organic tissues are preserved. He was the first to demonstrate that soft-tissues can be extensively replicated by authigenic minerals in the laboratory. He has played a major role in investigations of a number of Lagerstätten in addition to the Burgess Shale , including Fezouata, Winneshiek, Beecher’s Bed, Herefordshire, and Hunsrück. He has contributed to discoveries on fossil groups of different ages ranging from the nature and vertebrate affinities of conodonts to the colour of dinosaur plumage.

Honors include Fellow of the Royal Society, Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been awarded the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London, the Boyle Medal of the Royal Dublin Society, the Paleontological Society Medal, the Lapworth Medal of the Palaeontological Association, and the Seilacher Medal of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Books

Allen, K.C. and Briggs, D.E.G. (eds) 1989 Evolution and the fossil record, xiii + 265pp. Belhaven Press, London. Briggs, D.E.G. and Crowther, P.R. (eds) 1990 Palaeobiology - a synthesis, xiii + 583 pp. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford. Allison, P.A. and Briggs, D.E.G. (eds) 1991 Taphonomy: releasing the data locked in the fossil record, xiv + 560 pp. Plenum Press, New York. Briggs, D.E.G., Erwin, D.H. and Collier, F.J. 1994 The fossils of the Burgess Shale, xvii + 238 pp. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London. Bartels, C., Briggs, D.E.G. and Brassel, G. 1998 Fossils of the Hunsrück Slate - marine life in the Devonian, xiv + 309 pp. Cambridge University Press. Briggs, D.E.G. and Crowther, P.R. (eds) 2001 Palaeobiology II, xv + 583 pp. Blackwell Science, Oxford. Barton, N.H., Briggs, D.E.G., Eisen, J.A., Goldstein, D. and Patel, N.H. 2007 Evolution, xiv + 833 pp. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Kühl, G., Bartels, C., Briggs, D.E.G. and Rust, J. 2011 Fossilien im Hunsrückschiefer: Einzigartige Fossilien aus einer einzigartigen Region, 120 pp. Quelle and Meyer Verlag, Wiebelsheim. Kühl, G., Bartels, C., Briggs, D.E.G. and Rust, J. 2012 Visions of a Vanished World: The Extraordinary Fossils of the Hunsrück Slate. 128 pp. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

Selected Papers Briggs, D.E.G., Clarkson, E.N.K. and Aldridge, R.J. 1983 The conodont animal. Lethaia 16, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1502-3931.1983.tb01993.x Whittington, H.B. and Briggs, D.E.G. 1985 The largest Cambrian animal, Anomalocaris, Burgess Shale, British Columbia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London B309, 569-609. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1985.0096 Briggs, D.E.G. and Fortey, R.A. 1989 The early radiation and relationships of the major arthropod groups. Science, 246, 241-243. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.246.4927.241 Briggs, D.E.G. and Kear, A.J. 1993 Fossilization of soft-tissue in the laboratory. Science 259, 1439-1442. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.259.5100.1439 Wills, M.A., Briggs, D.E.G. and Fortey, R.A. 1994 Disparity as an evolutionary index: a comparison of Cambrian and Recent arthropods. Paleobiology 20, 93-130. https://doi.org/10.1017/S009483730001263X Orr, P.J., Briggs, D.E.G. and Kearns, S.L. 1998 Cambrian Burgess Shale animals replicated in clay minerals. Science 281, 1173-1175. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.281.5380.1173 Briggs, D.E.G. 2003 The role of decay and mineralization in the preservation of soft-bodied fossils. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 31, 275-301. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.earth.31.100901.144746 Martínez-Delclòs, X., Briggs, D.E.G. and Peñalver, E. 2004 Taphonomy of insects in carbonates and amber. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 203, 19-64. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0031-0182(03)00643-6 Vinther, J., Briggs, D.E.G., Prum, R.O. and Saranathan, V. 2008 The colour of fossil feathers. Biology Letters 4, 522-525. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2008.0302 Farrell, Ú.C., Martin, M.J., Hagadorn, J.W., Whiteley, T. and Briggs, D.E.G. 2009 Beyond Beecher’s Trilobite Bed: Widespread pyritization of soft-tissues in the Late Ordovician Taconic Foreland Basin. Geology 37, 907-910. : 10.1130/G30177A.1 Van Roy, P., Orr, P.J., Botting, J.P., Muir, L.A., Vinther, J., Lefebvre, B., el Hariri, K. and Briggs, D.E.G. 2010 Ordovician faunas of Burgess Shale type. Nature 465, 215-218. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09038 Li, Q.-G., Gao, K.-Q., Vinther, J., Shawkey, M.D., Clarke, J.A., D’Alba, L., Meng, Q.-J., Briggs, D.E.G. and Prum, R.O. 2010 Plumage color patterns of an extinct dinosaur. Science 327, 1369-1372. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1186290 Briggs, D.E.G. and Summons, R.E. 2014 Ancient biomolecules: their origin, fossilization and significance in revealing the history of life. Bioessays 36, 482-490. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201400010 Briggs, D.E.G., Liu, H., McKay, R.M. and Witzke, B.J. 2018 The Winneshiek biota; exceptionally well-preserved fossils in a Middle Ordovician impact crater. Journal of the Geological Society, London 175, 865-874. https://doi.org/10.1144/jgs2018-101 Siveter, D.J., Briggs, D.E.G., Siveter, D.J. and Sutton, M.D. 2020 The Herefordshire Lagerstätte: fleshing out Silurian marine life. Journal of the Geological Society, London 177, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1144/jgs2019-110 Wiemann, J., Menéndez, I., Crawford, J.M., Fabbri, M., Gauthier, J.A., Hull, P.M., Norell, M.A. and Briggs, D.E.G. 2022 Fossil biomolecules reveal an avian metabolism in the ancestral dinosaur. Nature 606, 522-526. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04770-6 Anderson, R.P., Woltz, C.R., Tosca, N.J., Porter, S.M. and Briggs, D.E.G. 2023 The importance of fossilisation to our reading of animal antiquity. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 38, 1060-1071. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2023.05.014

Honors

1999 Fellow of the Royal Society. 2000 Lyell Medal, Geological Society of London. 2010 Sc.D. (honorary doctorate), Trinity College, University of Dublin. 2015 Paleontological Society Medal. 2019 Member American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 2019 Lapworth Medal, Palaeontological Association. 2025 Seilacher Medal, Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony.