In a paper published in National Science Review, scientists used machine learning to reconstruct the geochemical composition of the Hadean continental crust. Based on Jack Hills zircons, the study reveals a felsic crust dominated by TTGs and potassic granites, formed through partial melting of mafic protocrust during crustal thickening. The results provide new constraints on early Earth’s tectonic evolution.

Melting glaciers may be silently setting the stage for more explosive and frequent volcanic eruptions in the future, according to research on six volcanoes in the Chilean Andes.

A Smithsonian-led team of researchers have discovered North America’s oldest known pterosaur, the winged reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs and were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight. In a paper published today, July 7, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by paleontologist Ben Kligman, a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, present the fossilized jawbone of the new species and describe the sea gull-sized pterosaur alongside hundreds of other fossils—including one of the world’s oldest turtle fossils—unearthed at a remote bonebed in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.

These fossils, which date back to the late Triassic period around 209 million years ago, preserve a snapshot of a dynamic ecosystem where older groups of animals, including giant amphibians and armored crocodile relatives, lived alongside evolutionary upstarts like frogs, turtles and pterosaurs.