Most U.S. teens aren’t always getting the social and emotional support they need, and most of their parents have no idea, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In a nationwide survey conducted after the most isolating period of the COVID-19 pandemic, only 28% of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 said they “always” received the social and emotional support they needed. However, 77% of their parents who responded to a related survey said they thought their children “always” had that support.

At the other end of the spectrum, 20% of the teens said they “rarely” or “never” had enough social and emotional support. That realization was shared by just 3% of their parents, according to the report published Tuesday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

This perception gap was shared to some extent by families in all racial and ethnic categories and across all levels of household income, the CDC statisticians found. The same was true for families with teen girls and for families with teen boys.

Parents with college or advanced degrees underestimated their teens’ need for social and emotional support, as did parents with a high school diploma or less. Likewise, parents misjudged their kids’ feelings regardless of whether they were raising their families in large cities, rural areas and communities in between, the researchers reported.

Jean Twenge, who has spent decades studying the mental health of adolescents, said the new findings were in line with long-term trends.

“We know from research that a lot of teens are struggling and don’t always share that with their parents,” said Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and author of “Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents and What they Mean for America’s Future.”

In part, those struggles can be traced to the fact that compared with their predecessors, today’s teens spend less time hanging out with their friends in person and more time communicating through smartphones and other digital devices, she said. That type of asynchronous communication can make people feel anxious as they wait for a reply.

What’s more, reading someone’s words instead of hearing them spoken face to face “doesn’t feel as emotionally deep,” Twenge said.

It may be tempting to dismiss the teens’ survey responses as typical adolescent angst. But the CDC researchers found significant links between the frequency with which teens wished they had more social and emotional support and their physical and mental health.

For instance, 14% of those who said they “sometimes, rarely, or never” got the support they needed described their physical health as “fair” or “poor.” That compares with 5% of those who “always or usually” felt socially and emotionally supported.

In addition, 67% of those with less social and emotional support rated their sleep quality as “poor,” compared with 37% of those with more support.

Among those who “sometimes, rarely, or never” received the social and emotional support they needed, 33% had signs of anxiety, 31% had symptoms of depression, and 14% had “very low life satisfaction.” The corresponding figures for those who “always or usually” had the social and emotional support they needed were 13%, 8% and 1%, the researchers reported.

While the link between emotional well-being and health is firmly established, the relationship between them is less clear.

“It could be that people who don’t get the emotional support they need are thus more likely to feel anxiety,” Twenge said. “It could also be that when you have anxiety, you don’t perceive that you’re getting the emotional support you need. That’s the key — this is not an objective thing.”

Overall, 52% of girls said they “always or usually” received the social and emotional support they needed, compared with 65% of boys, the researchers found.

Additionally, 42% of Black teens, 50% of Latino teens, 61% of Asian teens and 66% of white teens “always or usually” had sufficient support, according to the report.

Finally, 44% of teens who identified as a member of a sexual or gender minority said they “always or usually” had sufficient support, compared with 64% of those who did not describe themselves as a member of one of these groups.

The CDC surveys were conducted between July 2021 and December 2022. That coincides with the period when COVID-19 vaccines became available to adolescents and schools that had leaned into distance learning required students to return to campus.

Other federal health surveys show that in-person social interactions were on the upswing between 2021 and 2022, but there’s still a long way to go, Twenge said.

“People are coming out of that a little,” she said, but “the numbers are still much much lower than they were in the ‘80s or ‘90s.”

The pandemic’s effects on children and teens prompted U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy to issue a rare advisory on youth mental health in late 2021. The advisory noted that 20% of young people around the world were experiencing anxiety and 25% had symptoms of depression, and that both figures had doubled since the start of the pandemic.

These and other signs of increasing psychological distress were more difficult to spot when schools were closed and other lockdown measures were in place, the advisory said.

Five poultry workers at a farm in northeast Colorado have been infected by the H5N1 virus, according to Colorado’s department of public health.

The workers were culling birds at a commercial poultry farm that had been affected by the virus. Their symptoms were mild, and included common “flu-like” respiratory symptoms — such as fever, chills, coughing, sore throat and runny nose — and conjunctivitis, or pink eye. None of the workers were hospitalized.

The virus also has been identified in the state’s dairy cattle and wild birds.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed four of the five cases.

Colorado’s health department said the fifth case was presumptive, and pending confirmation.

The CDC said its risk assessment for the general public remains low, and its recommendations have not changed.

“An assessment of these cases will help inform whether this situation warrants a change to the human health risk assessment,” said the agency in a statement released Monday.

These are the first cases of H5 virus infection in poultry workers since 2022. The first ever U.S. case of H5N1 in a poultry worker was reported in Colorado in April 2022.

There have also been four cases of H5 in dairy workers. One of those cases was located in Colorado.

The CDC has sent a bilingual field team into the area to support the state’s investigation. The team of nine people includes epidemiologists, veterinarians, clinicians and an industrial hygienist.

Public health officials say it is safe to eat properly handled and cooked poultry products.

Essexella fossils date back to the Carboniferous period, when northern parts of Illinois hovered just above the equator. A local river delta fed into the sea, creating a network of brackish wetlands home to sea scorpions, centipedes and early amphibians. Many of these creatures were buried by mudslides, which protected their remains from scavengers and decay. In the 19th century, coal miners began excavating an area, known as Mazon Creek, for fuel, and the fossils turned up in their spoil heaps.

Collectors have been finding the remains of these critters in the Mazon Creek fossil beds for more than a century. Most of the fossils are entombed in ironstone nodules. Cracking these concretions reveals the imprints of soft-bodied animals that resemble bulge-eyed aliens. In the 1950s, a local collector named Francis Tully discovered the imprint of a torpedo-shaped creature with a nozzlelike mouth. The taxonomic identity of the “Tully monster” has perplexed researchers ever since.

Essexella was similarly perplexing. Nondescript fossils turned up by the thousands at Mazon Creek, and they were often sold at local flea markets, or even discarded.

Scientists published the first detailed scientific description of the blobs in 1979. Essexella fossils are composed of two structures — a textured, barrel-shaped region and a smooth bulb. Researchers posited that the textured area represented a skirtlike curtain that wrapped around jellyfish tentacles. The rounded region was the jellyfish bell.

But as time passed, this description struck many researchers as odd.

“We were really shoehorning it to fit the jellyfish model,” Dr. Plotnick said.

No living jellyfish have curtains around their tentacles. Such a curtain would make swimming and feeding cumbersome. The uniform shape of the blob fossils also perplexed Dr. Plotnick. “If it was a jellyfish that fell on the seafloor, it would just splatter out in all directions like an old string mop on the floor,” he said.

Dr. Plotnick tested some other hypotheses to explain the blobs — such as gelatinous, barrel-shaped critters called salps or colonial congregations of tiny creatures known as siphonophores — but each new identity failed to explain Essexella’s anomalous anatomy.

In late 2016, Dr. Plotnick and a colleague, James Hagadorn, a geologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, investigated the motherlode of blobs. They were at the Field Museum in Chicago, a repository for Mazon Creek fossils that has the world’s largest Essexella collection. Most had been donated by amateur collectors who were too intrigued to leave the fossils in the scrap heap.

The scientists sifted through drawer after drawer of the splotchy specimens. They lined up several fossils to photograph and compare side by side on a table. One of the blobs caught Dr. Plotnick’s eye. As he rotated the fossil upside down, he was struck by the clarity that the change of perspective offered.

“It looked like the bottom of an anemone,” Dr. Plotnick said. He added, “That was one of only a few times I’ve actually had the classic eureka moment.”

As Dr. Plotnick brushed up on sea anemone anatomy, the ambiguous blobs came into focus. “All the things that bothered us about this being a jellyfish now makes sense,” he said.

Instead of being a jellyfish’s bell, the rounded region of the Essexella was an anemone’s burrowing base. The textured barrel was not a tentacle-enclosing curtain but the body of the anemone. Some specimens are preserved so well that the scientists could see the muscles that the anemone used to bend and contract.

Dr. Plotnick, Dr. Hagadorn and their team redescribed Essexella as an ancient anemone last year in the journal Papers in Palaeontology. Because of their soft bodies, ancient anemone species are mostly known from only a handful of poorly preserved fossils. With thousands of relatively well-preserved Essexella specimens, this once puzzling species is now the best-known anemone in the fossil record. Dr. Plotnick posits that these animals once lined the floor of the Mazon Creek estuary.

This isn’t the only time that paleontologists have flipped the scientific script to clarify the identity of a bizarre fossil. Reconstructing any ancient animal is tricky. After millions of years in the ground, fossils have been warped and weathered, crushed and scattered and stamped flat onto slabs of stone.

Sometimes, a fossil’s preservation alone is enough to disorient researchers. For decades, paleontologists were stumped by why armor-clad dinosaurs called Ankylosaurs were almost always fossilized upside down. In 2018, a team posited that the heavily armored animals often went belly up because of bloating as their carcasses floated out to sea.

And then there are the evolutionary oddballs that are difficult to decipher no matter the orientation of their fossils. In 1869, the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope mistakenly placed the skull of an Elasmosaurus, a marine reptile, at the end of the creature’s tail instead of its elongated neck. Othniel Charles Marsh, another paleontologist, seized on Cope’s error, igniting a rivalry that would fester into the so-called Bone War.

Even weirder was Hallucigenia. For decades, researchers could not make heads or tails of the creature, a worm covered in tentacles and stiltlike spines. Then they realized that its head was really its tail, and vice versa. “That was fun and not a mere detail,” said Jean-Bernard Caron, who is a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum and a co-author of a study in 2015 that determined a bulb on one end of the Hallucigenia was the creature’s head. Better-preserved fossils of a related animal in China also revealed that Hallucigenia, like Essexella, was originally reconstructed upside down.

“Clearly Hallucigenia has seen many flips,” Dr. Caron said.

While Dr. Caron’s work helped straighten out Hallucigenia, a recent paper upends his 2012 description of Pikaia, an enigmatic wormlike creature from the Burgess Shale in Canada that was purported to be an early forerunner to vertebrates. The new study suggests that a mysterious tubelike organ that researchers thought ran along Pikaia’s back (and may have been an early nerve cord) is actually the animal’s gut cavity, running along its belly.

“The animal is now on its head!” Dr. Caron said. Yet another fossilized creature got a new story when it turned over.