According to local lore, a lightning strike in 1800 transformed a sickly infant in Lyme Regis into a curious, brilliant child. That child was Mary Anning, who grew up to pull literal sea monsters from English cliffs and became an unparalleled paleontologist before the word existed. This episode explores how a poor cabinetmaker's daughter, fossil hunting as winter survival work amid landslides and tides, provided the undeniable physical evidence that animals could go extinct and forced science to grasp deep time.

At twelve she helped extract a 17-foot ichthyosaur skeleton, and in 1823 she discovered the first complete plesiosaurus, a creature so strange that anatomist Georges Cuvier accused her of forgery before being proven wrong. Self-taught from copied scientific papers and kitchen-table dissections, she identified fossilized ink sacs and ...