Measles Surge Raises Alarm as Detention Center Cases Highlight Public Health Risks: Two confirmed measles cases at the Dilley family immigration detention center in Texas underscore a rapidly expanding U.S. outbreak that experts warn is accelerating. Nationwide, 588 cases have already been reported this year—25% of last year’s total occurred in January alone—with most infections among unvaccinated individuals. South Carolina leads with 876 cases and at least 18 hospitalizations, while Arizona and Utah are also reporting sustained spread. Physicians warn detention facilities can amplify transmission because of crowding, limited healthcare access, and population movement. Pediatric infectious disease specialists say falling vaccination rates are fueling the crisis, emphasizing the MMR vaccine remains the most effective prevention. Hospitals are implementing emergency measures, including masking, screening, and telehealth, as experts caution the outbreak may worsen without stronger vaccination efforts and coordinated public health action. (The Guardian)

New Chicken-Sized Dinosaur Baffles Paleontologists: A newly described “chicken-sized” plant-eater from Early Cretaceous Spain, Foskeia pelendonum, is forcing paleontologists to rethink how early ornithischian dinosaurs evolved. Researchers say the animal’s skull is unexpectedly specialized for something so small, and its anatomy doesn’t fit neatly into long-standing family-tree assumptions about early plant-eating lineages. The find also underscores a broader pattern: small-bodied dinosaurs can carry highly derived traits, meaning “simple” size doesn’t equal “primitive” biology. By placing Foskeia into a revised evolutionary context, the work aims to clarify when key feeding adaptations emerged and how quickly early ornithischians diversified across ancient European environments. (Scientific American)

Baby Dinosaurs Were the Backbone of the Jurassic Food Chain: A UCL-led analysis argues that juvenile sauropods—tiny compared with their adult, megaherbivore forms—were an abundant and crucial food source that helped sustain multiple predator species in the Late Jurassic. Drawing on fossil evidence and a reconstructed food web from the Morrison Formation, the researchers suggest dinosaur ecosystems functioned with a “steady supply” of vulnerable young animals, reducing pressure for predators to evolve ultra-specialized hunting strategies. The work reframes how paleontologists picture predator-prey dynamics in classic Jurassic landscapes: instead of predators primarily targeting gigantic adults, much of the caloric foundation may have come from babies and very young individuals. The study also highlights how life-stage matters when interpreting fossil ecosystems and evolutionary arms races. (ScienceDaily)

Fossil Hunters Uncover 132-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Footprints on South Africa’s Coast: Newly reported trackways on South Africa’s coastline document dinosaur movement roughly 132 million years ago, adding a rare coastal-window into Early Cretaceous behavior. The finds include multiple footprint sets preserved in rock that was once soft sediment, later hardened and exposed by modern erosion. Beyond the headline “dinosaur footprints,” the value is contextual: track spacing, directionality, and preservation can help constrain gait, body size, group movement, and the specific shoreline conditions that captured the impressions. The reporting also emphasizes how citizen discovery and targeted follow-up by specialists can expand the ichnology record—especially in dynamic coastal settings where fossils may appear and disappear quickly. This is a reminder that shorelines can be productive (and time-sensitive) fossil archives. (Phys.org)

Huayuan Biota Decodes Earth’s First Phanerozoic Mass Extinction: A study highlighted via Phys.org points to the “Huayuan biota” as a high-resolution fossil record for interrogating the earliest Phanerozoic mass extinction. By analyzing changes in fossil assemblages across the extinction interval, researchers argue the site helps resolve how marine ecosystems reorganized when biodiversity crashed—and what kinds of organisms persisted or rebounded. The work is positioned as a decoding effort: not just listing what lived there, but using stratigraphy and community turnover to test extinction timing, selectivity, and recovery pathways. If the record is as continuous as suggested, it could sharpen comparisons with later mass extinctions by showing how early complex ecosystems responded to extreme stress. For paleontology, the promise is improved causal inference, not just richer storytelling. (Phys.org)

The Earliest Known Vertebrates Had Four Eyes—and They Worked a Lot Like Ours Do: Fossils of tiny, jawless Cambrian fish known as myllokunmingids may preserve evidence for four eyes, including a central pair that researchers propose later evolved toward the pineal system. The Smithsonian summary notes soft-tissue preservation allowed scientists to identify pigment-related structures (melanosomes) and lens-like features, supporting the idea these weren’t merely light spots but image-forming, “camera-type” eyes. If correct, the work pushes sophisticated vertebrate visual anatomy deeper into the Cambrian than many accounts assume, and it reframes how sensory complexity arose early in vertebrate history. The piece also highlights scientific debate: not everyone is convinced prominent multi-eye arrangements make functional sense, so interpretation and developmental homology remain active questions. (Smithsonian Magazine)

How Early Reptiles Tuned Their Hearing: Tiny Fossil Bones Meet Modern Lizard Ears: A Smithsonian Voices interview follows NMNH paleontologist Kelsey Jenkins’ work on hearing in early reptiles during the Permian—an interval she argues is often treated as a dull “in-between” despite major sensory transitions. Jenkins and colleagues examined fossil stapes (middle-ear bones) from Youngina capensis and compared them with middle-ear bones of modern geckos, which have among the best reptile hearing. The comparison suggests Youngina could likely detect relatively high frequencies, implying meaningful auditory capability before the rise of modern reptile lineages. The larger takeaway is methodological: carefully pairing rare fossil microanatomy with living analogs can turn a tiny bone into a functional hypothesis about behavior, communication, and ecological opportunity in deep time. (Smithsonian Magazine)

New Archaeopteryx Study Finds Complex Tongue Bones and “Fleshy Teeth” Linked to Flight Demands: A Field Museum–backed study of Archaeopteryx argues that some feeding-apparatus traits associated with modern birds—an extra tongue bone, a sensitive bill-tip organ, and fleshy structures (“teeth”) on the roof of the mouth—may trace back to the earliest known bird. The news release frames these as adaptations that could improve food capture and processing, addressing the high caloric demands of flight. Because Archaeopteryx sits near the boundary between non-avian feathered dinosaurs and true birds, the findings also speak to a classic paleontological problem: how to diagnose “birdness” when skeletons are similar. The work suggests that mouth and soft-tissue correlates, painstakingly prepared and interpreted, may hold key signals of early avian ecology. (EurekAlert!)

Possible New Ornithopod Species in Wyoming: Widely Separated Bones May Belong Together: Idaho State University paleontologists report that fossils split across collections—an unusual toe bone and braincase at Idaho’s museum and a skull/skeleton (“Arky”) in a Swiss museum—may point to one or more previously unrecognized ornithopod species from northern Wyoming about 150 million years ago. The team highlights distinct traits: a metatarsal that’s longer and slimmer than typical, a groove not seen in comparable specimens, and a braincase with a backward-pointing prong, alongside multiple skull proportions described as atypical. Importantly, they frame this as a hypothesis, not a formal naming: one isolated limb bone is risky for defining a species, so they’re using the odd metatarsal as a “flag” to target additional matching skeletons. It’s a case study in museum-based synthesis driving field priorities. (Idaho State University)

Respiratory Systems as a Key to Re-Dividing Blastoids (Echinoderms): A Journal of Paleontology paper proposes a new high-level division (a “superorder” split) within Blastoidea—extinct echinoderms—using respiratory anatomy as the organizing principle. Instead of leaning primarily on external shape, the work emphasizes how respiratory structures vary across blastoids and argues these differences track deep evolutionary lineages. For paleontology, this kind of revision matters because it changes how fossils are grouped, which then affects downstream interpretations of diversity curves, paleoecology, and biogeographic history. The study’s premise is that respiratory architecture is not just a minor trait but a fundamental functional system with phylogenetic signal strong enough to reorder classification. Even if parts of the proposal are debated, it illustrates an enduring trend: “internal” functional morphology can overturn taxonomy built largely from external characters. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)

The Genetic Turning Point That May Have Enabled Vertebrate Complexity: Not strictly paleontology, but directly relevant to deep-time evolutionary transitions: a University of St Andrews team reports a genetic shift near the invertebrate–vertebrate boundary that may have helped unlock vertebrate complexity. Comparing sea squirts, lampreys, and frogs, they find increased isoform diversity (more protein variants from key signaling effector genes) right around the transition to vertebrates. The implication is that a rise in “tunable” signaling outputs could have enabled more cell types and more specialized tissues during development—one mechanistic route to bigger evolutionary leaps. It’s a useful complement to fossil narratives: while fossils show when body plans appeared, molecular work can propose how developmental systems became capable of producing them. The study also flags why these pathways matter today: the same signaling systems are central to disease and drug targeting. (ScienceDaily)

Grey-Market Peptides Gain Fans—and Alarm Doctors Over Unregulated Risks: Unregulated injectable peptides such as BPC-157, TB-500, and GHK-Cu are gaining popularity among biohackers, athletes, and tech workers who claim benefits ranging from faster injury recovery to improved cognition and anti-aging effects. However, experts warn these grey-market substances are not FDA-approved, lack quality control, and pose serious health risks. Often sold online “for research purposes only,” some are bootleg versions of approved drugs, while others are experimental compounds with little human data. Physicians caution that peptides can trigger allergic reactions, infections, hormonal disorders, or even accelerate undiagnosed cancers. Despite anecdotal hype amplified by social media influencers, clinical evidence remains weak. Doctors urge patients to stop using these products or, at minimum, disclose use for harm reduction, emphasizing proven approaches like rehabilitation, sleep, nutrition, and evidence-based medical care. (The Guardian)