Derek Briggs is the Yale University G Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, and former Director of the Peabody Museum.
10 Facts About Derek Briggs
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Derek Briggs was educated at Trinity College Dublin where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Geology in 1972.
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Derek Briggs went on to the University of Cambridge to work under British palaeontologist Harry Blackmore Whittington.
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Derek Briggs was awarded a PhD in 1976 on Arthropods from the Burgess Shale, Middle Cambrian, Canada.
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Derek Briggs became the G Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics at Yale in 2011.
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Derek Briggs's work involves a range of approaches from experimental work on the factors controlling decay and fossilisation, through studies of early diagenetic mineralisation and organic preservation, to field work on a range of fossil occurrences.
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Professor Derek Briggs has made several remarkable discoveries of exceptionally preserved fossils.
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Derek Briggs's researches have elucidated their evolutionary significance, resulting in a significant shift in the focus of palaeontology toward these important windows on the life of the past.
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Derek Briggs demonstrated that morphological disparity among living arthropods is similar to that in the Cambrian, indicating that the functional and developmental constraints on form were operative from the earliest stages of metazoan evolution.
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Derek Briggs described the first evidence of the soft-tissues of conodonts, which resolved the vexed question of their affinities, with the recognition that these important fossils are the earliest known vertebrates.