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NARRATOR: This is Dorset on England's south coast.
A 90-mile stretch of shoreline here
can tell us a lot about the evolution of flight.
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This is the Jurassic Coast.
Its rocks all full of fossils of prehistoric creatures,
including evidence of the first back-boned animals ever to fly.
But it wasn't until the 19th century
that scientists started putting together those clues
to form a detailed picture of one of the most
dramatic periods in the whole of the history of life.
And they had an unlikely ally, a middle-aged woman
from a local town who used to come out to scour
these cliffs for those clues.
She'd come in all weathers, but particularly
after there had been heavy storms which might of
removed some section of the cliff
and so expose specimens that no one had ever seen before.
Her name was Mary Anning.
She had an almost unbelievable talent for unearthing fossils.
So extraordinary were her achievements,
that some called her the Princess of Paleontology.
When you consider Mary Anning's status,
a woman from a working-class background
with no formal education to speak of,
it may seem strange that she acquired
such a prestigious reputation.
Until, that is, you see what it was she discovered.
The Natural History Museum in London.
It holds one of the most comprehensive collections
of fossils in the world.
And those Mary Anning discovered are among the very best
and the most important.
The whole section of the museum is filled with her finds.
Most of the creatures she collected
were giant, aquatic reptiles, fish-eating monsters
that dominated the seas.
But she found other things too.
In 1828 Mary Anning made one of her most sensational
discoveries.
This is it.
It's a small animal, but its head is missing
and its spine is missing.
But what remains is fascinating.
There's its pelvis, its upper leg, its lower leg,
and there is it's foot with its toes.
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And here is its arm, which ends at the hand with fingers.
Except that one of these fingers is hugely elongated.
It runs all the way along here.
And Mary Anning probably realized what that meant.
It meant that that long finger supported a wing.
And as more specimens were discovered,
it was realized that this was certainly
a reptile with a wing, so it was called
pterosaur, winged lizard.
Mary Anning had found the blueprint
for the first large animals ever to fly,
a creature that set the pattern for a whole new phase
of aerial evolution.
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