Betty Joan Echols was born in 1932 in Ohio. She received a Bachelor of Science in Geology from Ohio State University and a Bachelor of Arts in Geology from the University of Texas. Echols conducted postgraduate research at the University of Kansas and Harvard University before accepting a teaching position as a professor in the Earth Science Department at East Texas State University in 1964 and retired in 1996. She assisted with many digs and paleontological discoveries in Northeast Texas, and she built a large collection of skeletal remains, including the bones of multiple dinosaurs and mammoths that once lived in the area.
