News sites are celebrating a "spectacular" new record for fossil DNA, claiming horse genes found in permafrost are 700,000 years old, placing the common ancestor two million years earlier than thought.
The news media jumped onto claims that a tiny primate fossil is an ancestor of human beings, when it is really an amazing example of biological miniaturization.
One might think that 154 years after Darwin's book about it, natural selection would be empirically obvious. The journal Nature went on a search for it in DNA.
Here are examples of recent claims in science that seem to contradict what some would consider intuitively obvious. They should be kept in mind when evaluating other scientific truisms, like evolution.