"Ravens are avian dinosaurs that shared an ancestor with mammals around 320 million years ago," the Science paper notes.
The fact that corvids have brains the size of a walnut might not be a disadvantage. A study published last year revealed that though their brains are much smaller than some apes, like the capuchin monkey, the brains of corvids and large parrots have large numbers of neurons in some parts of their brains, at high density. Kabadayi said that their connection speeds might be even faster than those of mammals due to these neurons' close proximity to one another.
Perhaps the idea of problem-solving intelligence in velociraptors [no Google, I did not mean "velocipedes", get a better bloody dictionary already !] is not so outlandish after all.
In this study, researchers from Lund University in Sweden trained ravens to use a simple machine where they dropped a rock in a tube to earn a food reward. Later, they were put in a room with the puzzle box (but no rock), which was then removed. An hour later, the birds were presented with a row of objects: the rock, and several distractions. Nearly all of them chose the rock, and 86 percent managed to successfully use it to open the machine when it was presented to them 15 minutes later.
In another experiment, 78 percent of ravens were able to successfully barter with a human and exchange goods—trading a bottlecap for a reward—a higher success rate than what's been seen in similar experiments done with apes.
I phoned co-author Can Kabadayi, a doctoral student in cognitive science, over Skype to ask him about the new paper. (His profile photo featured two ravens perched on his head and shoulder.)
He described to me how one experiment took an eerie turn: One raven in the experiment figured out how to work their rock/box contraption first, then began teaching the method to other ravens, and finally invented its own way of doing it. Instead of dropping a rock to release a treat, the future Ruler of the Raven Kingdom constructed a layer of twigs in the tube, and pushed another stick down through the layer to force it open. The bird had to be removed from the experiment before it could teach any other birds how to do it.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wj8p3n/ravens-are-so-smart-one-hacked-this-researchers-experiment
Well, now that Yellow Yellow has died, research into bear-proof boxes is stagnating anyway, so reallocating more scientists to research raven-proof boxes is kind of logical.
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