Terrible Lizard

"In 1812 a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Anning was collecting fossils for her father beneath the cliffs of Dorset when she discovered the outline of a lizardlike skeleton embedded in the limestone. Working with a small hammer, she unearthed a giant prehistoric animal seventeen feet in length.". "News of her discovery baffled scholars and attracted the attention of the Reverend William Buckland, and eccentric Oxford naturalist known for his interest in geology or "undergroundology," as he called it. Buckland eagerly used Mary's find and other remnant fossils to set in motion a quest to…