This is the true story of Mary Anning, an independent-minded girl who lives by the sea in England in the early 1800s. Her family has a curiosity shop, and every day she goes out along the seashore to look for unusual stones to sell—“Don’t ever stop looking, Mary,” her father tells her. One day she spots the outline of a tooth in a flat stone. As she carefully digs it out, outlines of other bones emerge, until eventually she uncovers the whole skeleton of an ichthyosaur, one of the first complete dinosaur fossils ever discovered. At first no one knows what to make of it—is it a dragon? A crocodile? A sea monster? But soon scientists studying fossils hear about it, and are amazed at her discovery. Mary had a gift for spotting fossils and made many other important finds; this is the story of her first “sea dragon.”