Shirley Sneath Kelley, a longtime Ladera resident and exuberant supporter of sports and charities, died in her sleep April 9 at The Sequoias in Portola Valley, her home of about 10 years. She was 96.
WHILE exploring an Arctic mountaintop in 2008, paleontologists unearthed a small skeleton that resembled a coiled sea serpent imprinted into a slab of 240 million-year-old rock. The remarkably complete skeleton, nicknamed Oda, was deposited in the collection of the University of Oslo’s Natural History Museum.
Ichthyosaur bones found in 250 million-year-old rock hint that these swimming reptiles may have appeared before Earth’s biggest mass extinction and survived
This mystery begins in 1952, in the Nevada desert, when a self-taught geologist came across the skeleton of a massive creature that looked like a cross between a whale and a crocodile. It turned out to be just the beginning. Ichthyosaurs were bus-sized marine reptiles that lived during the age of dinosaurs, when this area of Nevada was underwater. Yet paleontologists found few other animals here, which raised the questions: Why were there so many adult ichthyosaurs, and almost nothing else? What could have killed them all? Paleontologist Neil Kelley says that recently, there has been a major break in the case some new evidence, and a hypothesis that finally seems to fit. Neil talked with Short Wave co-host Aaron Scott about his theory of the case, and why it matters to our understanding of the past.