A Certain Immortality
Suzy Buttles McIntire ’78 MARCH discovers an ancient flying reptile that now bears her name.
A longtime volunteer at the Smithsonian’s FossiLab, Suzy Buttles McIntire ’78 MARCH was one day simply doing what she’d done for years, hunting for fossils inside rock recovered from a 209-million-year-old bonebed at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
Using tiny hand tools to clean away loose sedimentary rock, McIntire discovered something extraordinary: North America’s oldest known pterosaur. Pterosaurs were flying reptiles that coexisted with dinosaurs and were the first vertebrates capable of powered flight.
A paper on the finding was published in July 2025 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The new species now bears McIntire’s name — Eotephradactylus mcintireae, or “ash-winged dawn goddess.”
At the moment of discovery, McIntire remembers first seeing a tooth — and then another. Eventually, she uncovered a fossilized jawbone, measuring about 4 centimeters, connected to multiple tiny teeth. “That was super exciting,” McIntire says. Identifying who the teeth belonged to is much easier when they’re attached to bone, she says, because teeth sit in bone in characteristic ways that provide diagnostic clues.
McIntire, 74, declared she wanted to be a paleontologist at age 13. Her family was living in Turkey at the time, and she had the chance to explore a fossil field with a neighbor, who was a geologist. She saw fossils scattered everywhere. “That’s when I was bitten,” she says.
Life took her in a different direction first. She worked as an architect before finding her way back to paleontology. At the Smithsonian, she worked as a contract photographer, taking photos of specimens, and volunteered as a fossil preparator before retiring last year.
“My friends have been teasing me that I’m immortal now.”
McIntire is proud of the lasting impact of her fossil discovery. “My friends have been teasing me that I’m immortal now, but I don’t know,” she says. “I’m looking at it more as that it’s the family pterosaur. It belongs to my grandchildren as well. It’s our family name.”
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