As a child she moved to the USA with her mother, spending her childhood in the Alabama towns of Leeds and Trussville. She studied geology and vertebrate paleontology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Colorado at Boulder, and held both museum and teaching positions. In 1988, she co-authored a paper describing the new genus and species of mosasaur, Selmasaurus russelli. Her most recent scientific publication is a paper on the biostratigraphy of Alabama mosasaurs, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (2002).