Liquid-liquid transition and inherited signatures in Zr-Cu-Ni-Al metallic glasses

•Apparent liquid-liquid transition (LLT) of several Zr-Cu-Ni-Al melts have been discovered at about 300 K above the liquidus temperature.•Two different glasses are obtained by regulating LLT in these alloys, manifesting that LLT comes from the competition between two types of atomic clusters.•LLT reconstructs the atomic structure at short-range order which was seldom verified in previous work.