Kathleen Valerie Bossy of Wakefield, RI, died on April 17, 2026, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Born to Oscar and Florence Hahn on December 27, 1942, she and her older sisters Joan and Lucille grew up in Morris County, New Jersey.

From the very start, Kathy excelled in all her school work and showed natural artistic talent. After graduating from Roxbury High School, she became the first person in her family to go to college. She won a scholarship to attend Douglass College (at Rutgers University), where she flourished and in 1965 received a B.A. with High Honors in Biology.

Kathy then went on to win a highly competitive five-year National Science Foundation fellowship for graduate studies at Yale University, in one of the country’s finest vertebrate paleontology programs. Her research centered on fossil collections of Yale’s Peabody Museum and other major natural history museums of the U.S. and Europe. She completed her PhD in 1976 with a dissertation on a semi-aquatic order of amphibians, the Urocordylid Nectrideans, whose newt-like fossils date from over 325 million years ago.

At a time when women faced so many obstacles in higher education, she was an intellectual trailblazer and a resolute educator, who taught comparative anatomy, vertebrate paleontology and evolutionary theory, first at Yale, then at Brown University and Bryant College.

While in graduate school, Kathy married Michel-André, whom she’d met in her college junior year, on a dance floor at a mixer. They were together for over six decades and had three children along with a succession of Siamese cats. With admirable tenacity, Kathy kept a household of five in balance with the demands of her jobs, while maintaining energy for a great many creative pursuits, primary among them, her magnificent garden.

Once retired from academia, Kathy immersed herself in local history and became an expert in textile conservation. She was a curator first at the Pettaquamscutt Historical Society, then at South County Museum. Drawing on her many artistic skills, she designed and crafted countless public exhibits and co-authored Lost South Kingstown, a book on vanished South County architecture.

She is survived by her loving family: husband Michel-André, daughters Denise and Estelle, son Nicolas, and granddaughter Sabine. The family will receive relatives and friends on Saturday, May 9 from 10 to 11 a.m. at the Avery-Storti Funeral Home, 88 Columbia St., Wakefield, Rhode Island 02879. The funeral service will follow at 11 a.m. In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation in Kathleen’s memory to the Heifer Foundation, the Wildlife Conservation Society, or another charity organization. For guest book and condolences, please visit: https://everloved.com/life-of…

We wish to thank the nursing home caregivers and other staff for their attentive help throughout the past year.

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