'Betty' the New Caledonian crow astonished the world when she 'spontaneously' bent straight pieces of garden wire into hooked foraging tools. Recent field experiments have revealed that tool bending is part of the species' natural behavioural repertoire, providing important context for interpreting Betty's iconic wire-bending feat. More generally, this discovery provides a compelling illustrati...

The extent to which non-humans understand their physical world is controversial, due to conceptual and empirical difficulties. We examine the evidence for physical understanding in the remarkable tool-oriented behaviour of New Caledonian crows, which make several types of tool in the wild and show prolific tool-related behaviour in captivity. We summarize our own research into the cognitive pro...

A recent study found that tool-manufacturing New Caledonian crows spontaneously solved a metatool task in which the birds used a tool to obtain a second, longer tool that could then be used to obtain food that was otherwise out of reach.

The Aegean Sea area is thought to be an actively extending back-arc region, north of the present day Hellenic volcanic arc and north-dipping subduction zone in Eastern Mediterranean. shows extensive normal faulting, ductile ‘extensional’ shear zones extensional S-C fabrics throughout islands that have previously been related regional extension associated with slab rollback on Subduction Zone. I...

U-Pb analyses of zircon from ten samples of augen gneisses, eight mafic and intermediate metaigneous rocks and six metasediments from some tectonic domains along the Calabria-Peloritani Terrane (Southern Italy) contribute to knowledge of peri-Gondwanan evolution from Late-Proterozoic to Paleozoic times. All samples were equilibrated under amphibolite to granulite facies metamorphism during the ...

Much of the immense present day biological diversity of Neotropical rainforests originated from the Miocene onwards, a period of geological and ecological upheaval in South America. We assess the impact of the Andean orogeny, drainage of Lake Pebas and closure of the Panama isthmus on two clades of tropical trees (Cremastosperma, ca 31 spp.; and Mosannona, ca 14 spp.; both Annonaceae). Phylogen...

The Andes are known to have influenced speciation patterns in many taxa, yet whether species diversification occurred simultaneously with their uplift or only after uplift was complete remains unknown. We examined both the phylogenetic pattern and dates of branching in Adelomyia hummingbirds in relation to Andean uplift to determine whether diversification coincides with the chronological phase...

1Department of Life Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow G4 0BA, UK 2School of Ophthalmology & Optometry, The Eye Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, Zhejiang 325027, China 3Department of Ophthalmology, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32610, USA 4Sichuan Provincial Key Laboratory for Disease Gene Study, Hospital of University of Electronic Scie...