Celebrating a young girl s age-old discovery © Christopher Jones/Alamy
When 12-year-old Mary Anning uncovered the complete skeleton of a fish-like creature near her home on England"s southern coast in 1811, extinction was a shaky idea in science. Fossils were nothing new—everything dies and leaves remains, after all. But could an entire species really die off? Were more of these 17-foot sea monsters lurking in the depths of the English Channel?