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Dr. Patricia Kelley                           Dr. Kelley, Dr. Hansen and colleagues

When I was seven years old I received a wonderful Christmas gift, a book all about dinosaurs.   It was full of exciting dinosaur pictures that captured my interest so much that I just had to recreate them with my paint set.    My grandmother was obnoxiously proud of my paintings, and she made me show them to the director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History one day when we were visiting the museum.   The director told me that if I painted a few more pictures of dinosaurs he would exhibit all of them at the museum, and so I did (paintings pdf) .   Today, these pictures are hanging on the walls of the Earth Sciences building at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where I am a professor of geology specializing in invertebrate paleontology ( http://www.uncw.edu/earsci/people/kelley.html ).

Being a paleontologist is like being a detective, using evidence from fossils to figure out how ancient organisms lived and died.   I find it fascinating that the history of life is laid out for us in the rock record.   Even as a child I was interested in fossils, collecting them whenever I visited my grandparents in New York state.   When it came time for me to attend college, it was a short hop from my childhood interests in dinosaurs and fossils to a major in geology.   After college I decided to pursue a graduate degree in paleontology at Harvard University.   I studied under one of the most famous paleontologists of the 20 th century, Dr. Stephen J. Gould ( http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ ) a leading researcher on how evolution takes place.   Fossils provide detailed evidence for evolution.   They show that life has changed and diversified from the simplest single-celled organisms to the amazing variety of life forms that exist today.   The best scientific explanation for this change is evolution.   Some people do not accept evolution because they think it contradicts their religious beliefs.   But I am a devout Christian married to a Presbyterian minister and I do not find a conflict between my faith and science ( http://www.geotimes.org/dec00/faith_feature.html ).

I am interested in how evolution takes place, especially how the evolution of a predator affects its prey and vice versa.   My specialty is fossil mollusks ranging in age from 80 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, to the present day.   My research focuses on carnivorous moonsnails that drill holes in the shells of their victims, including clams and other snails, in order to eat them.   To better understand this clam and snail arms race, my colleague Thor Hansen ( http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~thorenet/ ) and I have enlisted the aid of middle school students.   The students are collecting data on modern moonsnail drilling to help us understand the fossil data ( www.moonsnailproject.org ).

*** If you are interested in paleontology you might enjoy reading The Dragon in the Cliff by Shelia Cole.   This novel tells the story of thirteen year old Mary Anning, the first person to discover the fossil of an entire marine dinosaur. Throughout her lifetime, Anning excavated many important fossils, earning recognition and honor for her work during a time when women were not even allowed to attend universities.

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