Chris Barnes graduated from the University of Birmingham in 1961 and moved to Canada, where he completed a doctoral degree at the University of Ottawa in 1964. Chris started his academic career by establishing a major centre of conodont research at the University of Waterloo where, based on his early work on the Ordovician of Ontario and Québec, he soon became one of North America's leading Early Palaeozoic conodont experts. In this capacity, he was one of the authors of the Middle–Upper Ordovician chapter in the landmark publication on North American conodont biostratigraphy published as Geological Society of America Memoir 127 in 1971 (Sweet et al., 1971). Although much of his early work was on biostratigraphy he diversified his research from the start, producing some of the earliest papers on conodont histology and ultrastructure (e.g. Barnes et al., 1973), on Lower Palaeozoic conodont provincialism and palaeoecology (e.g. Barnes & Fåhræus, 1975; Fortey & Barnes, 1977) and on thermal maturation in conodonts and its application (e.g. Nowlan & Barnes, 1987) – papers which have a marked influence on conodont research to this day. In the 1970s he devoted much of his energy to the Ordovician stratigraphy of northern Canada, publishing papers on stratigraphy and conodonts from Hudson Bay to the Arctic …