Martin Brasier was a Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He has been on NASA panels exploring the possibility of life on Mars. His books include Darwin’s Lost World (2009) and Secret Chambers: the inside story of cells and complex life (2012). In 1970 while Ship’s Scientist aboard HMS Fawn during its cruise across the reefs and lagoons of the Caribbean, he saw that the analysis of interconnections between and within systems might provide a key for decoding the early history of life. Since then, he has sought to expand his understanding of big transitions in the fossil record, exploring: patterns and processes in the Cambrian explosion; origins of the animal phyla; the dynamics of reefal and foraminiferal symbioses through deep time; phosphorus and the carbon cycle in deep time; origins of terrestrial ecosystems; the earliest fossil record; and the origins of life itself. He was secretary and then leader of the International Geoscience Programme, UNESCO. On Dec. 16, 2014 Martin Brasier died in a car accident. He will be greatly missed.