Two studies demonstrate that children aged five to six rely on species essentialism as a basis for rationalizing parent-offspring resemblance, using a novel version of the cross-species adoption paradigm in which information about distribution of features is manipulated. Children displayed sensitivity to implicit distributional cues to feature innateness, making more birth-parent projections when a target feature was potentially species-specific than when it was species-orthogonal. In addition, research shows that children differentiate between mental and physiological features, and make more adoptive projections for the former than for the latter.