NatureWrap: New to the tree of life
Plus two clever birds and tips on hibernating.
Pictured above is
Hippocampus nalu, Africa’s first and only-known pygmy seahorse and one of 213 newly described plant and animal species added to the tree of life this year by the Californian Academy of Sciences.
Its colleagues include 101 ants, 22 crickets, 15 fishes, 11 geckos, 11 sea slugs, 11 flowering plants, eight beetles, eight fossil echinoderms, seven spiders, five snakes, two skinks, two aphids, two eels, one moss, one frog, one fossil amphibian, one fossil scallop, one sea biscuit, one fossil crinoid (or sea lily) and one coral.
Credit: Adolf Peretti, GRS Gemresearch Swisslab
The Raven: A Birdbrain Nevermore psychologytoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from psychologytoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Ravens are as intellectually skilled as chimpanzees study
Young ravens showed social and physical skills on a par with Great Apes, say German scientists. Their study also suggests that ravens brains, while different from mammals, are cognitively advanced.
Ravens are on par with Great Apes in cognitive performance, researchers in Germany have found
Scientific Reports concluded Friday.
The first large scale study of ravens cognitive skills helped to unravel one of science s great mysteries, researchers said: How avian brains different from mammals had evolved, providing parallel intelligence over 300 million years.
How was the test carried out?
The common ravens (Corvidae) were hand-raised at the Max Planck Institute (MPG) for Ornithology near Munich. They were released into an outdoor aviary and put through so-called PCTB experiments often used for Great Apes.
Rendimiento cognitivo de simio adulto en cuervos de cuatro meses invdes.com.mx - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from invdes.com.mx Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Researchers led from Germany analysed the birds performance in tests that explored how ravens understand the physical world and interact with each other.