In birds, big brains aren’t associated with living in large social groups – instead, they’re linked to long stints of parental feeding.
Any hominid fossil find with molar teeth can be plugged into a new equation that reveals its species’ prenatal growth rate.
Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images
Using a new equation based on today’s primates, scientists can take a few molar teeth from an extinct fossil species and reconstruct exactly how fast their offspring grew during gestation.
Vera Weisbecker, Flinders University et Jeroen Smaers, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)
Some animals, such as California sea lions, have small brains relative to their body size, but are still impressively intelligent, showing brain evolution is even more complex than it appears.