In the remote, sunburned badlands of Petrified Forest National Park, where ancient rocks lie scattered like forgotten ruins and time itself seems fossilized into the earth, a team of scientists has uncovered a relic from a world on the cusp of transformation. It is not just a bone, nor merely a fossil. It is a jaw—delicate, tooth-studded, and unmistakably alien—belonging to a creature that once soared over a supercontinent 209 million years ago.
This ancient relic, the fossilized lower jaw of a seagull-sized winged reptile, has now been confirmed as the oldest known pterosaur ever found in North America, and one of the earliest ever unearthed outside Europe. In a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the discovery was unveiled by a team led by Ben Kligman, a paleontologist and Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
Yet this discovery is more than just a point on the evolutionary map. It is a glimpse—vivid and thrilling—into a world teeming with life and poised on the brink of cataclysm. The fossil emerged from a hidden bonebed nestled deep within the Owl Rock Member, a geologic formation rich in ancient volcanic ash and rarely studied due to its extreme remoteness.
Here, in northeastern Arizona, scientists unearthed not just one extraordinary species but an entire prehistoric ecosystem: giant amphibians, armored crocodile-like reptiles, early turtles with spike-studded shells, and small evolutionary newcomers like frogs, lizards, and of course, the winged enigma now named Eotephradactylus mcintireae—“ash-winged dawn goddess.”
Its name evokes both the volcanic past that buried it and the celestial grace with which it once danced through the sky. And its story, like that of the site where it was found, helps fill in a haunting gap in our understanding of life on Earth before the age of dinosaurs truly began.
The pterosaur’s fossil, remarkably preserved with teeth still embedded in its delicate jaw, was discovered not by a seasoned researcher, but by Suzanne McIntire, a longtime volunteer at the Smithsonian’s FossiLab. For 18 years, McIntire worked under a microscope, gently chipping away millimeters of hardened rock from fossils that had spent eons entombed in silence. It was her careful hands that revealed the fossil that now bears her name.
“What was exciting about uncovering this specimen was that the teeth were still in the bone,” McIntire said, “so I knew the animal would be much easier to identify.”
Those teeth—sharp, worn, and densely spaced—offered a clue into how this ancient flier lived. Eotephradactylus likely fed on armored fish that once teemed in the region’s braided river channels, an ecosystem alive with aquatic giants and scaly swimmers.
To imagine this world is to step into a prehistoric dreamscape. Some 209 million years ago, this land sat just above the equator, tucked into the center of the massive supercontinent Pangaea. The climate was semi-arid, but rivers crisscrossed the landscape, swelling with seasonal floods that brought life—and, sometimes, death. One such flood likely washed volcanic ash and sediment into a channel, burying an entire ecosystem in an instant, preserving bones and teeth in exquisite detail.
The result? A time capsule, waiting to be opened.
That opening began over a decade ago, in 2011, when a team led by Smithsonian research geologist Kay Behrensmeyer, braved the rugged, rattlesnake-infested terrain in search of early mammal relatives. They didn’t find what they were looking for—instead, they found something far more unexpected: hundreds upon hundreds of bones from species never before known to science.
“That’s the fun thing about paleontology,” said Kligman, who joined the project as a graduate student in 2018. “You go looking for one thing, and then you find something else that’s incredible that you weren’t expecting.”
Because the fossil site was so rich and remote, collecting all the bones in the field was impossible. Instead, researchers encased huge chunks of the bonebed in plaster jackets and shipped them to the Smithsonian, where volunteers like McIntire spent thousands of hours carefully extracting bones in public view at the museum’s FossiLab.
The painstaking work paid off. Over time, the team identified more than 1,200 individual fossils from 16 distinct vertebrate groups, capturing the complex interplay of an ecosystem both ancient and modern. There were early amphibians the size of grown humans, sleek coelacanth fish with lineage tracing back hundreds of millions of years, and spike-armored turtles that wouldn’t look out of place in a fantasy novel.
One such turtle fossil, small enough to fit inside a shoebox, had spiked protrusions on its shell and may have been one of the earliest to ever live on North American soil. Its presence is significant not just because of its age, but because it shows that these primitive reptiles had already spread far across Pangaea—despite their small size and slow gait.
“This suggests that turtles rapidly dispersed across Pangaea,” Kligman explained. “Which is surprising for an animal that is not very large and is likely walking at a slow pace.”
The pterosaur, too, was a world traveler. Most of the earliest known pterosaur fossils have been found in Europe, so discovering one in Arizona from this early in their history expands the known range of these creatures and hints at a rapid evolutionary expansion shortly after they emerged.
Importantly, the Owl Rock bonebed captures a moment of transition. These animals lived just before the end-Triassic extinction (ETE)—a global cataclysm around 201.5 million years ago, likely triggered by massive volcanic eruptions that fractured the supercontinent and altered the climate. The extinction event wiped out nearly three-quarters of species on Earth, including many of the older lineages preserved at this site.
It was this destruction that cleared the stage for the Age of Dinosaurs to fully begin.
“The site captures the transition to more modern terrestrial vertebrate communities,” Kligman said, “where we start seeing groups that thrive later in the Mesozoic living alongside these older animals that don’t make it past the Triassic.”
What makes this find so powerful is that it provides direct, physical evidence of that evolutionary handoff. Until now, fossils from the crucial window right before the ETE have been scarce, especially on land. Volcanic ash within the Owl Rock Member allowed researchers to precisely date the fossils to about 209 million years ago—placing them mere millions of years before the world would forever change.
Despite being relatively young geologically, these layers were long neglected due to their location in the park’s most isolated terrain. William Parker, a co-author of the study and paleontologist at Petrified Forest National Park, noted that the Owl Rock exposures had received far less attention than other formations—simply because getting to them was so difficult. That’s what makes this site a revelation.
Now, with this collaboration between the Smithsonian, Petrified Forest National Park, and institutions like Columbia College Chicago, MIT, and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, a new chapter is being written in our understanding of Triassic life.
The scientific importance of the find is clear. But its emotional weight comes from something deeper—the image of a tiny creature, no larger than a gull, flitting through humid air above a world full of roaring predators and lumbering reptiles. It is easy to imagine Eotephradactylus gliding low over a riverbank, searching for armored fish beneath the surface, unaware that it lived in the twilight of an age.
It is also a tribute to the quiet, meticulous labor of people like McIntire, who with eyes straining through a microscope and a hand steady with care, gave this ancient creature back to the world. Her reward? A fossil species that will carry her name for all time.
The discovery reminds us that science is not always loud. Sometimes it is slow, patient, and silent—until it speaks, through bones that whisper across epochs.
And when it does, it tells stories not just of extinction, but of endurance, of connection, and of a planet constantly remaking itself in the fires of transformation.
More information: Kligman, Ben T., Unusual bone bed reveals a vertebrate community with pterosaurs and turtles in equatorial Pangaea before the end-Triassic extinction, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2505513122. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2505513122