At first, they weren’t sure what they had found. But the longer 11-year-old Mary Anning and her 15-year-old brother Joseph exam- ined it, the more they realized what they had found was big — very big. They dug out the last few rocks with excited hands and brushed away the final handfuls of sand. They stopped, stepped back, and stared. They had uncovered the entire thing: A giant fossilized skull measuring four feet in length that looked like the head of a giant crocodile. The Anning children had found fossils before on the beaches of their small seaside town of Lyme Regis on the English Channel but nothing like this. They knew that after winter storms, they could find fossils of small spiral seashells called ammonites. But here they were today, gazing at what was clearly the com- plete head of an enormous beast, unlike anything they had ever seen before — something no one had ever seen before.
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