Source: SFGate
“A remarkable finding has surfaced in the colorful, fossil-rich badlands of Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park: North America’s oldest known pterosaur. The newly identified species — a flying reptile that soared over the dinosaurs during the late Triassic Period — was unearthed by a team led by Ben Kligman, a UC Berkeley graduate and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History paleontologist. Their discovery is hundreds of millions of years (or 16 years, depending on how you look at it) in the making. In 2009, Smithsonian geologist and vertebrate paleontologist Anna Behrensmeyer spearheaded a project aimed at finding fossils from the earliest mammals, which came about during the late Triassic Period (about 225 million years ago). Mammals were small when they first evolved, with fragile bones that were poorly preserved.” (07/21/25)