years ago

Twenty-five years ago, in front of a packed crowd of 90,185 at California's Rose Bowl Stadium, Brandi Chastain stepped up to score the winning spot-kick in a penalty shootout as the United States beat China to win the Women’s World Cup on home soil.

Just two months before that, almost exactly two years ago, the “Jay Leno’s Garage” star was treated for second- and third-degree burns he sustained while working on an old car in his Burbank garage.

His mother, University of California, Riverside, paleoecologist Mary Droser, was searching for fossilized remnants of animals from the Ediacaran era, stretching from approximately 635 million years ago to 541 million years ago, during which the first complex animals evolved.

Researchers have struggled to understand how this great diversity came about, because until now, the earliest fossils of this group, which date back to the Cambrian about 540 million years ago, were already quite varied in form and behavior.

The resort has prompted controversy in the past - four years ago the dunes at Menie lost their status as a nationally-important protected environment.