Rock layers in China have yielded yet another strange bird. Two features in its partial skull—the only parts found—make it both a unique discovery and a challenge to nature-only origins stories.

On December 21 about an hour before sunset, the planets Jupiter and Saturn will appear very close together low in the western sky in a celestial event called a conjunction.¹ In fact, the two planets will be so close together that they should appear as a “double planet” to the naked eye.

Dogs don’t read the words on a page. Neither did Coco, the famous gorilla that learned to communicate using simple hand signs. So what affords humans the unique ability to read and write, and why do we do it? These kinds of questions drive Zeynep Saygin’s research at Ohio State. Her team’s recent discovery sets the stage for some answers.

Sever an arm from an octopus, and like an underwater zombie it’ll keep groping its surroundings. Even without a brain, its suckers still detect and grab crabs in lab experiments. Now Harvard researchers have begun discovering what makes octopus suckers so smart.

Nearly 20 years ago, a team of anthropologists presented the finding of a fossil skull that was very chimp-like in many respects.¹ However, the skull had several unusual features that led to the claim that the ape-like creature was an early bipedal ancestor from the early stages of human evolution.