At a Christmas party in 2006, the biophysicist Harold Morowitz asked Hazen whether there were clay minerals during the Archean Eon. Hazen could not recall a mineralogist ever having asked whether a given mineral existed in a given era, and it occurred to him that no one had ever explored how Earths mineralogy changed over time. He worked on this question for a year with his closest colleague, geochemist Dimitri Sverjensky at Johns Hopkins University, and some other collaborators including a mineralogist, Robert Downs; a petrologist, John Ferry; and a geobiologist, Dominic Papineau. The result was a paper in American Mineralogist' that provided a new historical context to mineralogy that they called mineral evolution.
Based on a review of the literature, Hazen and his co-authors estimated that the number of minerals in the Solar System has grown from about a dozen at the time of its formation to over 4300 at present. (As of 2017, the latter number has grown to 5300.). They predicted that there was a systematic increase in the number of mineral species over time, and identified three main eras of change: the formation of the Solar System and planets; the reworking of crust and mantle and the onset of plate tectonics; and the appearance of life. After the first era, there were 250 minerals; after the second, 1500. The remainder were made possible by the action of living organisms, particularly the addition of oxygen to the atmosphere. This paper was followed over the next few years by several studies concentrating on one chemical element at a time and mapping out the first appearances of minerals involving each element.