Derek Briggs

Derek Ernest Gilmor Briggs ( born 1950 ) is an Irish paleontologist who is primarily concerned with fossils of the Cambrian.

Briggs studied at Cambridge University, where he was a 1974-1977 Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, and worked with Harry Blackmore Whittington and Simon Conway Morris on the famous fossils of the Burgess Shale fossil site from the Cambrian. Today he is considered one of the leading specialists for this.

1977 to 1985 he was at Goldsmiths College, London University and from 1985 to 2002 professor at the University of Bristol. 2001/2 he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He is since 2003 professor at Yale University, Director of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies (since 2004) and Curator of Paleontology, invertebrates at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, whose director he was since 2008.

He also studied experimentally with Fossilierungsvorgängen and the preservation conditions of soft tissues. With Euan Clarkson and Richard Aldridge in 1983 he published an essay on the identity of the conodont animal after soft tissue findings in the Carboniferous in Edinburgh.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (1999) and Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. In 2001 he won the Boyle Medal of the Royal Dublin Society, 2000, the Lyell Medal and the Premio Capo d' Orlando. In 2003, he became president of the Paleontological Society, and 2002 to 2004 he was President of the Palaeontological Association. He is a corresponding member of the Palaeontological Society since 2008.

Writings

  • With Peter Crowther (Editor) Paleobiology II, Blackwell Publ 2001
  • With Nicholas Barton, Jonathan Eisen, David Goldstein, NIPAM Patel Evolution, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 2007
  • DH Erwin, FJ Collier The fossils of the Burgess Shale, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC 1994
  • With C. Bartels, G. Brasselsberg The fossils of the Hunsrück Slate, Cambridge University Press, 1998 ( Hunsrück slate of Devon )
  • With Peter Allison (Editor) taphonomy, Plenum Press 1991
  • Keith Allen (Editor ), Evolution and the fossil record, Smithsonian Institution Press 1990
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