A study of New Caledonian crows, which use sticks to fish beetle larvae out of tree trunks, shows exactly how advantageous tool use can be for animals. "Evolutionarily, animals that use tools have an ...

Crows are rewriting our understanding of intelligence. These birds meticulously select and shape tools for specific tasks. They even use one tool to get another, showcasing advanced planning. Their ...

The ability to plan for future events is one of the defining features of human intelligence. Whether non-human animals can plan for specific future situations remains contentious: despite a sustained ...

New Caledonian crows are known for their toolmaking, but Alex Taylor and his colleagues wanted to understand just how advanced they could be. Once, in captivity, when a New Caledonian male crow had ...

Mounting tiny video cameras to the tail feathers of crows, researchers discovered that the birds use a variety of tools to seek food, and even make their own tools, plucking, smoothing and bending ...

Crows are often considered among the most intelligent bird species in the world, due in part to having the largest brain-to-body ratio of all birds. These members of the Corvus genus mate for life, ...

When Jane Goodall first encountered chimpanzees using twigs as tools in 1960—something that scientists had assumed only humans could do — she wrote an excited telegram to her colleague Louis Leakey: ...