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 coprolites. Yet the gentleman geologists who relied on her insights repeatedly published her discoveries under their own names, locking her out of the establishment she helped build.

• Why the anoxic Blue Lias seabed preserved marine reptiles so perfectly
• The 1820 Birch auction that functioned as a 19th-century rescue fund
• The plesiosaur’s 35 neck vertebrae that defied biological blueprints
• How her finds dismantled the great chain of being and proved extinction
• Posthumous honors including a NASA drill site on Mars named for her