Animal Learning and Intelligence

Giant, fearsome octopuses may have once ruled the ancient seas, according to new research that flips the script on their evolutionary past. By uncovering exquisitely preserved fossil jaws hidden inside rock, scientists revealed that early octopuses from the age of dinosaurs weren’t shy, soft-bodied drifters—they were massive apex predators, possibly stretching up to 20 meters long and crushing prey with powerful bites.

A fossil ape discovered in northern Egypt is reshaping the story of human evolution. The species, Masripithecus, lived about 17 to 18 million years ago and may sit very close to the ancestor of all modern apes. This finding challenges the long-standing focus on East Africa. Instead, it points to northern Africa and nearby regions as a possible birthplace of apes.

A cow named Veronika has stunned scientists by using tools in a flexible and purposeful way. She chooses different ends of a brush depending on the part of her body and adjusts her movements accordingly. This level of tool use is incredibly rare and was previously seen mainly in primates. The finding hints that cows may be much smarter than we assume.

Tiny, tooth-sized fossils have just reshaped the story of our deepest ancestry. Paleontologists have discovered the southernmost remains ever found of Purgatorius—the earliest-known relative of all primates, including humans—in Colorado’s Denver Basin. Previously thought to be confined to Montana and parts of Canada, this shrew-sized, tree-dwelling mammal now appears to have spread southward soon after the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Cleaner wrasse have revealed a remarkable new side of fish intelligence. Marked with fake parasites, they used mirrors to inspect and remove the spots—far faster than seen in earlier tests. Even more striking, some fish dropped shrimp in front of the mirror to watch how its reflection moved, a form of exploratory “contingency testing.” The findings suggest self-awareness may extend well beyond mammals.

Triceratops’ massive head may have been doing more than just showing off those famous horns. Using CT scans and 3D reconstructions of fossil skulls, researchers uncovered a surprisingly complex nasal system hidden inside its enormous snout. Instead of being just a supersized nose for smelling, it likely housed intricate networks of nerves and blood vessels—and even special structures that helped regulate heat and moisture.

A bonobo named Kanzi surprised scientists by successfully playing along in pretend tea party experiments, tracking imaginary juice and grapes as if they were real. He consistently pointed to the correct locations of pretend items, while still choosing real food when given the option. The results suggest that imagination may not be exclusive to humans after all.

Dogs began diversifying thousands of years earlier than previously believed, with clear differences in size and shape appearing over 11,000 years ago. A massive global analysis of ancient skulls shows that early dogs were already adapting to different roles in human societies. This challenges the idea that dog diversity is mainly a product of recent breeding. Instead, it points to a long process of coevolution between humans and their earliest canine companions.

Environmental change doesn’t affect evolution in a single, predictable way. In large-scale computer simulations, scientists discovered that some fluctuating conditions help populations evolve higher fitness, while others slow or even derail progress. Two populations facing different kinds of change can end up on completely different evolutionary paths. The findings challenge the idea that one population’s response can represent a whole species.

Scientists have uncovered ancient wolf remains on a small Baltic island where wolves could only have been brought by humans. These animals weren’t dogs, but true wolves that ate the same marine food as the people living there and showed signs of isolation and possible care. One even survived with an injured limb that would have made hunting difficult. The findings suggest humans once kept and managed wolves in ways far more complex than previously imagined.

Consciousness evolved in stages, starting with basic survival responses like pain and alarm, then expanding into focused awareness and self-reflection. These layers help organisms avoid danger, learn from the environment, and coordinate socially. Surprisingly, birds show many of these same traits, from subjective perception to basic self-awareness. This suggests consciousness is far older and more widespread than once believed.

Humans don’t just recognize each other’s voices—our brains also light up for the calls of chimpanzees, hinting at ancient communication roots shared with our closest primate relatives. Researchers found a specialized region in the auditory cortex that reacts distinctly to chimp vocalizations, but not to those of bonobos or macaques, revealing an unexpected mix of evolutionary and acoustic influences.

Chimpanzees naturally ingest surprising amounts of alcohol from ripe, fermenting fruit. Careful measurements show that their typical fruit diet can equal one to two human drinks each day. This supports the idea that alcohol exposure is not a modern human invention but an ancient primate habit. The work strengthens the “drunken monkey” hypothesis and opens new questions about how animals use ethanol cues in their environment.

Researchers studying thousands of canine genomes discovered that wolf DNA is still present in most dog breeds. This ancient genetic influence shows up in traits like body size, behavior, and environmental resilience. Even dogs bred far from wolves, including tiny chihuahuas, carry detectable wolf ancestry. The findings highlight how deeply intertwined the histories of dogs and wolves really are.

Data from over 47,000 dogs reveal that CBD is most often used in older pets with chronic health issues. Long-term CBD use was linked to reduced aggression, though other anxious behaviors didn’t improve. The trend was strongest among dogs whose owners lived in cannabis-friendly states.

Scientists have traced kissing back to early primates, suggesting it began long before humans evolved. Their analysis points to great apes and even Neanderthals sharing forms of kissing millions of years ago. The behavior appears to have persisted through evolution as a social or bonding tool. Yet its patchy presence across human cultures hints at a mix of biology and cultural invention.

Chimps may revise their beliefs in surprisingly human-like ways. Experiments showed they switched choices when presented with stronger clues, demonstrating flexible reasoning. Computational modeling confirmed these decisions weren’t just instinct. The findings could influence how we think about learning in both children and AI.

UCL scientists found that human skulls evolved much faster than those of other apes, reflecting the powerful forces driving our brain growth and facial flattening. By comparing 3D models of ape skulls, they showed that humans changed about twice as much as expected. The findings suggest that both cognitive and social factors, not just intelligence, influenced our evolutionary path.

Birds across the globe independently evolved a shared warning call against parasites, blending instinct and learning in a remarkable evolutionary pattern. The finding offers a rare glimpse into how cooperation and communication systems evolve across species.

Gifted dogs can categorize toys by function, not just appearance. In playful at-home tests, they linked labels like “fetch” and “pull” to toys—even ones they’d never seen before. The findings hint that dogs form mental concepts of objects, much like humans, pointing to deeper cognitive abilities.

Young orangutans master the art of building intricate treetop nests not by instinct alone, but by closely watching their mothers and peers. Researchers tracking wild Sumatran orangutans over 17 years discovered that “peering”—the deliberate act of observing nest construction—is the key to learning.

Researchers discovered that bees use flight movements to sharpen brain signals, enabling them to recognize patterns with remarkable accuracy. A digital model of their brain shows that this movement-based perception could revolutionize AI and robotics by emphasizing efficiency over massive computing power.

Long before evolution equipped them with the right teeth, early humans began eating tough grasses and starchy underground plants—foods rich in energy but hard to chew. A new study reveals that this bold dietary shift happened 700,000 years before the ideal dental traits evolved to handle it.

Ape behavior just got a name upgrade — “scrumping” — and it might help explain why humans can handle alcohol so well. Researchers discovered that African apes regularly eat overripe, fermented fruit off the forest floor, and this habit may have driven key evolutionary adaptations. By naming and classifying this behavior, scientists are hoping to better understand how alcohol tolerance evolved in our ancestors — and how it might have helped shape everything from safety in the trees to social drinking rituals.

Despite our strong belief in dogs' ability to sense good from bad in people, new research shows they may not actually judge human character, at least not in the way we think. When dogs watched how humans treated other dogs, they didn’t favor the kinder person later. Even direct interactions didn’t sway their behavior. The study suggests dogs' reputational judgments might be more nuanced—or harder to study—than we realized.

Tourists feeding wild elephants may seem innocent or even compassionate, but a new 18-year study reveals it s a recipe for disaster. Elephants in Sri Lanka and India have learned to beg for snacks sugary treats and human food leading to deadly encounters, injuries, and even the ingestion of plastic. Once wild animals become accustomed to handouts, they lose their natural instincts, grow bolder, and risk both their lives and the safety of humans.

Dogs trained by everyday pet owners are proving to be surprisingly powerful allies in the fight against the invasive spotted lanternfly. In a groundbreaking study, citizen scientists taught their dogs to sniff out the pests’ hard-to-spot egg masses with impressive accuracy. The initiative not only taps into the huge community of recreational scent-detection dog enthusiasts, but also opens a promising new front in protecting agriculture. And it doesn’t stop there—these canine teams are now sniffing out vineyard diseases too, hinting at a whole new future of four-legged fieldwork.

Dogs trained to detect Parkinson’s disease using scent have shown remarkable accuracy in new research. In a double-blind trial, they identified skin swabs from people with Parkinson’s with up to 80% sensitivity and 98% specificity, even when other health conditions were present. The findings offer hope for a simple, non-invasive diagnostic method using biomarkers that appear long before traditional symptoms, potentially allowing earlier treatment and slowed disease progression.

What if humans didn’t have to suffer the slow-burning fire of chronic inflammation as we age? A surprising study on two types of lemurs found no evidence of "inflammaging," a phenomenon long assumed to be universal among primates. These findings suggest that age-related inflammation isn’t inevitable and that environmental factors could play a far bigger role than we thought. By peering into the biology of our primate cousins, researchers are opening up new possibilities for preventing aging-related diseases in humans.

Scientists at UC Davis discovered a small genetic difference that could explain why humans are more prone to certain cancers than our primate cousins. The change affects a protein used by immune cells to kill tumors—except in humans, it’s vulnerable to being shut down by an enzyme that tumors release. This flaw may be one reason treatments like CAR-T don’t work as well on solid tumors. The surprising twist? That mutation might have helped our brains grow larger over time. Now, researchers are exploring ways to block the enzyme and give our immune system its power back.

Poachers are using a sneaky loophole to bypass the international ivory trade ban—by passing off illegal elephant ivory as legal mammoth ivory. Since the two types look deceptively similar, law enforcement struggles to tell them apart, especially when tusks are carved or polished. But scientists may have found a powerful new tool: stable isotope analysis.

Two Ice Age wolf pups once thought to be early dogs have been identified as wild wolves, thanks to detailed DNA and chemical analysis. Surprisingly, their last meals included woolly rhinoceros meat—an unusually large prey item—hinting that ancient wolves might have been bigger than today’s. Their well-preserved bodies also shed light on wolf pack behavior and Ice Age environments.

Humpback whales have been observed blowing bubble rings during friendly interactions with humans a behavior never before documented. This surprising display may be more than play; it could represent a sophisticated form of non-verbal communication. Scientists from the SETI Institute and UC Davis believe these interactions offer valuable insights into non-human intelligence, potentially helping refine our methods for detecting extraterrestrial life. Their findings underscore the intelligence, curiosity, and social complexity of whales, making them ideal analogues for developing communication models beyond Earth.

In the long battle to create an effective HIV vaccine, scientists have made a major leap forward. A new study shows that a series of vaccines can coax the immune system to produce powerful antibodies capable of blocking a wide range of HIV strains -- including those that are typically the hardest to stop.

Two of the traits that set modern humans apart from non-human primates are taller stature and a higher basal metabolic rate. Researchers have identified a genetic variant that contributed to the co-evolution of these traits. This mutation seems to help people grow taller -- especially when they consume a lot of meat.

African elephants are the largest land animals on earth and significantly larger than their relatives in Asia, from which they are separated by millions of years of evolution. Nevertheless, Asian elephants have a 20 percent heavier brain, as scientists were able to demonstrate. They also showed that elephant brains triple in weight after birth. These results provide potential explanations for behavioral differences between African and Asian elephants as well as for the pachyderms' long youth, during which they gain enormous experience and learn social skills.

Researchers have shown that the evolution of a family of exported proteins in the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum enabled it to infect humans.

Animal abduction: Biologists documented five male capuchin monkeys carrying at least eleven different infant howler monkeys -- a behavior never before seen in wild primates. Rise and spread: The sightings were remotely recorded by over 85 camera traps, which allowed scientists to pinpoint the origin and subsequent spread of this social tradition over a 15-month period.

A team of researchers has identified distinct mother-offspring attachment types in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus). Drawing parallels with human psychology, the study provides compelling evidence that wild chimpanzee infants, like human children, develop critical secure and insecure-avoidant attachment patterns to their mothers. However, unlike humans and some captive chimpanzees, wild chimpanzees did not exhibit disorganized attachment characterized by high rates of aggression. This raises new questions about how this type of attachment may be shaped by survival and modern environmental pressures.

Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite generation of meaning by combining phonemes into words and words into sentences. This contrasts with the very few meaningful combinations reported in animals, leaving the mystery of human language evolution unresolved.

New report shows drastic decline in endangered primates and calls for conservation measures.

Animal research on biomusicality, which looks at whether different species are capable of behaving in ways that show they recognize aspects of music, including rhythm and beat, remains a tantalizing field at the intersection of biology and psychology. Now, the highly trained California sea lion who achieved global fame for her ability to bob her head to a beat is finally back: starring in a new study that shows her rhythm is just as precise -- if not better -- than humans.

A new study comparing wild and zoo-housed Sumatran orangutans reveals that life in a zoo significantly alters how orangutans interact with their environment. Researchers analyzed over 12,000 instances of daily exploratory object manipulation (EOM) -- the active manipulation and visual inspection of objects associated with learning and problem-solving -- across 51 orangutans aged 0.5 to 76 years. The findings show that orangutans living in zoos engage in more frequent, more diverse, and more complex exploration than their wild counterparts.

Researchers have applied object recognition technology to track changes in brain cell structure and provide new insights into how the brain responds to heroin use, withdrawal and relapse.

Scientists suggest social spiders are more about going with the flow than sticking to a role, after new research challenges the idea of fixed personalities.

Even under today's climatic conditions, the long-extinct straight-tusked elephant could still live in Europe. This is the conclusion of a recent study. For this finding, the research group combined fossil finds with reconstructions of past climates.

Through intensive breeding, humans have pushed breeds such as pug dogs and Persian cats to evolve with very similar skulls and 'smushed' faces, so they're more similar to each other than they are to other dogs or cats.

Millions of years ago, a fiery plume rising from Earth’s mantle reshaped continents, closing ancient seas and lifting land that would forever change life on our planet. This upheaval forged a bridge between Africa and Asia, allowing elephants, giraffes, cheetahs—and even the ancestors of humans—to cross into new worlds. The timing was everything: if the connection had formed even a million years later, evolution might have taken a different course, and our story could have unfolded along an entirely different path.

Researchers have discovered that honey bees from the same colony have different preferences in terms of defensive behavior. While some are still hesitating, others are already attacking.

Macaque mothers experience a short period of physical restlessness after the death of an infant, but do not show typical human signs of grief, such as lethargy and appetite loss, finds a new study by anthropologists.

Dogs could help predict valley fever spread in humans. A new study finds a strong correlation between occurrence of dog and human disease.

A new, exploratory study has revealed statistical links between the performance of medical detection dogs and their scores on behavioral and affective tests, finding that more 'optimistic' dogs tended to perform better overall on detection tasks, but 'pessimistic' dogs had higher scent detection specificity.

New research into the overlooked environmental impact of pet dogs has found far-reaching negative effects on wildlife, ecosystems and climate.

Comprehensive reference genomes have now been assembled for six ape species: siamang (a Southeast Asian gibbon), Sumatran orangutan, Bornean orangutan, gorilla, bonobo and chimpanzee. Areas of their genomes previously inaccessible because of structural complexity have now mostly been resolved. The resource is already lending itself to comparative studies that offer new insights into human and ape evolution, and into what underlies the functional differences among these species.

Researchers from chemistry, biology, and medicine are increasingly turning to AI models to develop new hypotheses. However, it is often unclear on which basis the algorithms come to their conclusions and to what extent they can be generalized. A publicationnow warns of misunderstandings in handling artificial intelligence. At the same time, it highlights the conditions under which researchers can most likely have confidence in the models.

A research team is developing a 3D-printed skin imitation equipped with living cells in order to test nanoparticles from cosmetics without animal testing.

A new study has found that the world's finest yodellers aren't from Austria or Switzerland, but the rainforests of Latin America. The research provides significant new insights into the diverse vocal sounds of non-human primates, and reveals for the first time how certain calls are produced. The researchers have discovered that special anatomical structures called vocal membranes allow monkeys to introduce 'voice breaks' to their calls. These have the same rapid transitions in frequency heard in Alpine yodelling, or in Tarzan's famous yell, but cover a much wider frequency range.

For dogs housed at Texas kennels, age and fecal score are important factors for screening for subclinical Giardia infections.

A new study has revealed that African Elephants have an extraordinary ability to meet their colossal food requirements as efficiently as possible. Data from over 150 elephants demonstrated that these giants plan their journeys based on energy costs and resource availability.

By watching the ebb and flow of the brain's chemical signals, researchers are beginning to disentangle the molecular mechanisms underlying the intrinsic motivation to learn. In a new study of zebra finches, researchers show that a hit a dopamine tells baby birds when their song practice is paying off. The findings suggest that dopamine acts like an internal 'compass' to steer their learning when external incentives are absent.