Detailed cranial morphology remains largely unknown for enantiornithines. In a paper published online August 21 in Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, Dr. WANG Min, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues reported a new enantiornithine bird from the Early Cretaceous Jehol Biota. Although incomplete, the skeleton is disarticulated and several cranial elements are exquisitely well preserved in their entirety, providing morphological information that had previously been poorly understood.

Dr. ZHU Min, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his team described a new galeaspid, Rhegmaspis xiphoidea, from the Lower Devonian Posongchong Formation of Zhaotong, Yunnan Province, China. The new form has a torpedo-shaped head-shield, a long rostral process and ventrolaterally set eyes, which highlight an adaptation to an active suprabenthic lifestyle as reported in the journal of Vertebrata PalAsiatica.

Dr. FU Qiaomei, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of Chinese Academy of Sciences (IVPP), and scientists from Germany, USA, Romania and Canada, discovered that a 37,000–42,000-year-old modern human from Pe？tera cu Oase, Romania had the order of 6–9% of the genome derived from Neanderthals, more than any other modern human sequenced to date. The finding published online June 22 in Nature suggests that the mixture between modern humans and Neanderthals was not limited to the first ancestors of present-day people to leave Africa, or to people in the Near East, and it occurred later as well and probably in Europe.