When I was a fossil-crazed tyke, I used to spend hours flipping through a set of LIFE Young Readers Nature Library books my parents had purchased. The multicolored collection was one of my earliest introductions to natural history and science, and all the time I spent with those pages seared a few illustrations onto my memory. One of the most frightening depicted the blue outline of a man projected against the black and white grimace of a monstrous marine reptile with a gape as tall as the human silhouette. This dragon, according to the caption, was Kronosaurus – a 42-foot-long, quad-paddled carnivore that ruled the seas of Cretaceous Australia around 100 million years ago.

I’m a little surprised the book’s simple