German paleontologists have discovered a 247-million-year-old fossil of a reptile with a bizarre row of plumes sprouting from its back. The elaborate display is a paradox of evolution. The plumes bear some similarities to feathers, even though the newly discovered reptile was not closely related to birds.

Stephan Spiekman, a paleontologist at the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History in Germany and an author of the new study, said that the discovery could change how scientists think about the origin of feathers. In birds, a complex network of genes is enlisted to sprout feathers from their skin. Part of the network might have already evolved in early reptiles more than 300 million years ago.

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To prepare for future pandemics, scientists look to the past for clues. Over the last century, a series of new pathogens have swept the world, including H.I.V., Zika virus and SARS-CoV-2.

But the further back researchers look, the fuzzier that history becomes. Thucydides chronicled the plague of Athens, a disease that ravaged the city-state around 430 B.C. Despite all his gory details — “the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath” — today’s historians and scientists still don’t know which pathogen was responsible for it.

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Companies like OpenAI and Meta are in a race to make something they like to call artificial general intelligence. But for all the money being spent on it, A.G.I. has no settled definition. It’s more of an aspiration to create something indistinguishable from the human mind.

Artificial intelligence today is already doing a lot of things that were once limited to human minds — such as playing championship chess and figuring out the structure of proteins. ChatGPT and other chatbots are crafting language so humanlike that people are falling in love with them.

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If you’ve ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very special experience. Indeed, it’s an all but unique one: Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do so, a new study reveals.

“It’s a new feature that has evolved and massively expanded in our species,” said Johanna Schick, a linguist at the University of Zurich and an author of the study. And that expansion, Dr. Schick and her colleagues argue, may have been crucial to the evolution of language.

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When Qiaomei Fu discovered a new kind of human 15 years ago, she had no idea what it looked like. There was only a fragment of a pinkie bone to go on.

The fossil chip, found in a Siberian cave called Denisova, looked as if it might have come from a 66,000-year-old relative of today’s humans, or maybe a Neanderthal. But Dr. Fu, then a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and her colleagues found DNA in the fossil that told a different story. The bone had belonged to a girl who was part of a third human lineage never seen before. They named her people the Denisovans.

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