Fossils usually provide paleontologists with little more than bones and teeth as primary data. Because the broad aim of functional morphological analyses of extinct organisms is to breathe life into fossils, paleontologists are challenged to reconstruct those portions of the animal not normally prese~ ed in the fossil record-in particular, soft tissues. Soft-tissue considerations are important for two major reasons:(1) Soft tissues often have korphogenetic over skeletal tissues, and (2) such considerations often lie at., the base of numerous paleobiological inferences. Furthermore, soft-tissue analysis can provide causal hypotheses of phylogenetic character correlation. A methodology for reconstructing soft anatomy in fossils-the Extant Phylogenetic Bracket approach-is proposed here. This method makes explicit reference to at least the first two extant outgroups of the fossil taxon of interest. It is based firmly on the relation of biological homology, provides a means of rigorously establishing the limits of our inferences, and allows construction of a hierarchy of inference. The approach can be applied to virtually any unpresemed trait of a fossil taxon with little or no modification.