Ella and Alex are seven-year-old Italian American twins who often go to Discovery Casa, a retirement home where their mother works as a nurse. One day, while there, they meet Layla, a six-year-old Afro-Panamanian girl who goes to Discovery Casa to visit her Abuelita, who tells the three friends that there is a new resident named Art--but nobody knows anything about him because he doesn't speak to anyone. Curious, Ella, Alex, and Layla go on a mission to find out who he is and they soon discover that he is an artist who painted a rather unusual and, at first glance, incorrect painting: three dinosaurs on a beach, with a woman in the background. What is a woman doing among dinosaurs? They wonder.

Before they know it, Art steps into his casa, wearing a white coat decorated with oil paint stains of different colors and a paintbrush in his pocket. Through a series of colorful and magical events, the paintbrush begins shimmering and shining, creating a glittery vortex that pulls the three friends into the painting and lands them on that very beach. This is when the real adventure begins: Ella, Alex, and Layla have traveled back in time thanks to Emet (which means Truth in Hebrew), the flamboyant, sarcastic, and knowledgeable paintbrush who, with a stroke of magic, will take them on many adventures throughout the series, where the children will meet pivotal figures that history has forgotten.

In the first book, the pivotal figure is Mary Anning, the female paleontologist whose findings on England's Jurassic Coast contributed to the theory of evolution put forth by Charles Darwin and uncovered secrets about dinosaurs. However, many of her discoveries were unfairly credited to male paleontologists because of her gender, and as a result, history has overlooked her pioneering role.