| Citation | Professor Briggs has made several remarkable discoveries of exceptionally preserved fossils. His 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. His work on the arthropods from the Burgess Shale of British Columbia has altered our perception of the nature of the Cambrian radiation. 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. He 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. More recently he has pioneered a combination of new experimental approaches to the process involved in fossilization of the 'soft parts' of animals. 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). |