12 Kids and Teens Who Changed Things, and Three Boys Who Found a T. Rex on a Hike

In July 2022, brothers Jessin, 10, and Liam, 7, their cousin Kaiden, 9, and the brothers’ dad were hiking on public land near Marmarth, North Dakota. Liam spotted “the bone sticking out of the rock.” Their dad sent a photo to a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

It turned out to be a young Tyrannosaurus rex, about 67 million years old, that scientists estimate was 12 to 14 years old. The kids helped dig it out, and in June 2024 the museum put it on display as Teen Rex.

In 2019, after finishing his junior year at Scarsdale High School in New York, Wolf Cukier spent the summer as an intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. His job was to check stars that volunteers had flagged in data from the TESS space telescope.

“About three days into my internship, I saw a signal from a system called TOI 1338,” he told NASA. “At first I thought it was a stellar eclipse, but the timing was wrong. It turned out to be a planet.” TOI 1338 b, about 6.9 times the size of Earth, was the mission’s first world orbiting two stars, and he co-authored the paper.

Louis Braille was a pupil at a school for blind students in Paris when he set out to build a better way to read. For three years he spent evenings, weekends and summer vacations refining his code, and at 15 he showed it to the school’s director.

His system fits every letter into a cell of six raised dots in two rows of three, which gives 64 possible combinations. In 1829 the school published his book explaining how the dots could write words, music and arithmetic. People around the world still read braille today.

Long before he was famous, Benjamin Franklin was a boy who loved to swim. The Franklin Institute says he was just 11 when he invented swim fins: two oval pieces of wood about 10 inches long, with a hole for the thumb, held in the hands like paddles.

Years later he described them in an essay: “In swimming, I pushed the edges of these forward and I struck the water with their flat surfaces as I drew them back. I remember I swam faster by means of these [palettes], but they fatigued my wrists.” He also tried fins for his feet, which worked less well.

Chester Greenwood of Farmington, Maine, was 15 when he made his first pair of ear protectors out of wire, beaver fur and cloth, according to the Maine Secretary of State. At 19 he got a U.S. patent for them.

By 28 he had a factory shipping his earmuffs around the world, and in its biggest year, 1936, it made 400,000 pairs. Greenwood kept inventing for the rest of his life: a wide-bottomed kettle and a spring-steel rake were his too.

George Nissen of Iowa liked to watch trapeze artists at the circus drop into the safety net and bounce back up into somersaults. At 16, after finishing high school, he set out to build a bouncing rig in his parents’ garage, using steel from a junkyard and a piece of canvas stretched across a frame.

At the University of Iowa he built his first successful one. Nissen went on to hold more than 40 patents related to sports and fitness, and his invention now sits in backyards around the world.

Philo Farnsworth was born in a log cabin in Utah in 1906 and rode to high school on horseback. At 14, TIME wrote, he came up with the idea of electronic television. As the story goes, he was tilling a potato field back and forth, row by row, when he realized that an electron beam could scan a picture the same way, line by line.

In 1927, at 21, he sent his first electronic image, and in 1934 he gave the first public demonstration of his system.

When William Kamkwamba’s family in Malawi couldn’t pay his school fees during a drought, he kept learning at the village library. A donated textbook called Using Energy had pictures of windmills.

Over six months, the 14-year-old built one from a broken bicycle, a tractor fan blade, an old shock absorber, a pair of flip-flops and a tower of blue gum wood. It made enough electricity for four light bulbs and two radios in his family’s home. He later worked on clean water, solar power and lighting for his village.

Gitanjali Rao, a seventh grader from Lone Tree, Colorado, watched her parents test their tap water and found the options slow and unreliable. So she designed her own device, which uses carbon nanotubes and a phone app to show whether water contains lead, and named it Tethys, after the Greek goddess of fresh water. At 11, it won her the title of America’s Top Young Scientist and $25,000.

In December 2020, at 15, she became TIME’s first-ever Kid of the Year. By then she had mentored 30,000 students in innovation workshops.

Kiara Nirghin, a 16-year-old high school junior in Johannesburg, read about farmers struggling with South Africa’s drought and wanted to help crops hold on to water. She boiled orange peels to get pectin, mixed it with dried orange peels and avocado skins, then baked it and crushed it into a powder.

The result could hold 300 times its weight in water, Scientific American reported, and in tests plants grown with it were taller and healthier. In 2016 her project took first place at a global science fair.

Melati and Isabel Wijsen grew up in Bali, where plastic washes up on the beaches. After a school lesson about people who changed the world, they went home at 12 and 10 and started a campaign called Bye Bye Plastic Bags. They ran petitions, organized beach cleanups and gave talks at TED and the United Nations.

In December 2018, Bali announced rules against single-use plastic, thanks in part to the sisters and other groups like theirs, NPR reported. In 2019 the rules were upheld in court.

In 1998, first grader Ryan Hreljac of Canada learned that people in Uganda didn’t have enough clean water. He saved $70, then found out that a well cost $2,000, so he asked his community for help, and the money built a well at Angolo Primary School in Uganda.

He kept going. Ryan’s Well Foundation now counts 1,721,135 people with access to clean water and sanitation, through 1,886 water projects in 17 countries.