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These crows have counting skills previously only seen in people


The corvids are the first animals other than humans known to produce a deliberate number of calls on command.

Investigating how animals understand numbers can help scientists to explore the biological origins of humanity’s numerical abilities, says Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trento in Rovereto, Italy. Andreas Nieder, an animal physiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and a co-author of the study published 23 May in Science 1, says it was amazing to see how cognitively flexible these corvids are. On the basis of the sound of the calls, the authors concluded that the birds generally set out to produce the correct number of caws, but sometimes lost track along the way.

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