Derek Briggs
Derek Ernest Gilmor Briggs (born 10 January 1950) is an Irish palaeontologist and taphonomist based at Yale University.[3] Briggs is one of three palaeontologists, along with Harry Blackmore Whittington and Simon Conway Morris, who were key in the reinterpretation of the fossils of the Burgess Shale.His nomination for election to the Royal Society reads: Professor Briggs has made several remarkable discoveries of exceptionally preserved fossils.He 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.His chemical and mineralogical investigations have demonstrated how soft tissues can be replicated at the cellular level in minerals such as apatite (the Medusa effect).