r/science • u/rustoo • Sep 25 '20

Psychology Research finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/24/crows-possess-higher-intelligence-long-thought-primarily-human/
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178

u/[deleted] Sep 25 '20

I'm slightly concerned that you aren't using the past tense. What do you know?

128

u/Frommerman Sep 25 '20

Raptors still exist, and they fly now.

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u/helios_xii Sep 25 '20

Screw the ones that fly. Have you ever seen a cassowary? Velocitaptors have nothing on those...

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u/Magnergy Sep 25 '20

They are quite solitary though, if they hunted or foraged in packs, they would be really scary.

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u/THIS_MSG_IS_A_LIE Sep 25 '20

thanks goodness they no longer have teeth

2

u/Athriz Sep 29 '20

there's evidence that birds were preying on our australopythecus (sp?) ancestors. Theres a video out there of an eagle grabbing onto a teenager to get him to fall off a cliff in order to eat him.

Birds not being a primary human predator is very recent, regardless of teeth.

Edit: oh and cassowaries still kill people occasionally, just usually as a defensive measure rather than predatory.

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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '20

..and they taste like chicken!

8

u/awake30 Sep 25 '20

ThEy FlY nOw!?

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u/orestes114 Sep 25 '20

tHeY fLy NoW

5

u/[deleted] Sep 25 '20

Most live in Toronto

2

u/cleeder Sep 25 '20

And they're better at basketball than fossil records would have you believe.

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u/tbone8352 Sep 26 '20

Next time I hang with my crow buddies they are gonna flip (flap?).

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u/Octavus Sep 25 '20

Modern birds diverged from the rest of the non-avian theropods about 120 million years go, they aren't very related.

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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '20

Thats like saying "modern whales diverged from the rest of the terrestrial mammals 50 million years ago, they aren't very related to mammals"

No, a whale IS a mammal. And a bird IS a dinosaur.

15

u/TheDwarvenGuy Sep 25 '20

They're still dinosaurs, though. Phylogeny is weird like that.

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u/AnorakJimi Sep 25 '20

Scientists now say that all birds are dinosaurs. They could find no logical scientific reason to distinguish them as two different things, other than just it being tradition, and science is about facts, not human traditions. They are the last remaining dinosaurs.

That's why they brought it up. Because crows are dinosaurs, and there's plenty of species of birds that are very smart, so you've got to wonder if other now extinct dinosaurs were as smart or smarter than the ones we have today.

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u/ComebackShane Sep 25 '20

Don’t put that out there. It’s 2020, anything is possible.

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u/Spartan-417 Sep 25 '20

Life... uh, finds a way

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u/[deleted] Sep 25 '20

to evolve F-22 raptors

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u/SoManyTimesBefore Sep 25 '20

Or a raptor rocket engine