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Artist’s reconstruction of the world’s oldest known modern bird, Asteriornis maastrichtensis, in its original environment.Phillip Krzeminski

An extraordinary fossil skull belonged to the oldest modern bird ever found. The duck-sized Asteriornis maastrichtensis lived 66.7 million years ago, just 700,000 years before the asteroid impact that killed off all non-avian dinosaurs. Paleontologists were staggered to discover the skull when they used a computed tomography scan to look inside a rock found in Belgium in 2000 by an amateur fossil hunter.

National Geographic | 7 min read

Read more: Go deeper with the expert view in the Nature News & Views

Reference: Nature paper

Three-dimensional image of the skull of the world’s oldest modern bird, Asteriornis maastrichtensis.Daniel J. Field, University of Cambridge

Notable quotable “I can't jump in front of the microphone and push him down.” Immunologist Anthony Fauci, the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the face of the scientific response to COVID-19 in the United States, describes the reality of doing press briefings with US President Donald Trump. (Science | 9 min read)

Features & opinion

A new book by groundbreaking field biologist George Schaller enumerates the rare delights and thorny political challenges of field work in Mongolia.

Nature | 4 min read

Male and female scientists have similar rates of publication and citation, when controlling for the difference in their career lengths. An analysis of the publishing careers of almost 8 million scientists from 1900 to 2016 finds that women tend to have shorter careers — and the gap is growing. “Women are pretty similar to men, as long as they stay in the system and do not drop out,” says computational social scientist Roberta Sinatra.

Nature Index | 5 min read