Late at night on a deserted beach, she found a 15 million-year-old fossil

Emily Bzdyk and a friend were combing a deserted Maryland beach late on a Saturday night earlier this month when the beam of her headlamp cut across what looked like a bone near the rippling tide line.

Fossil hunters like the pair have been pulling prehistoric shark and skate teeth as well as bone shards of other long extinct sea animals from the Calvert Cliffs along the Chesapeake Bay for years. But what Bzdyk had stumbled upon was rare — and possibly unprecedented.