tortoise
dr. dolittle | August 12, 2016It must be Friday. I found myself perusing YouTube videos and I came across these showing pet tortoises that have figured out how to solve some interesting problems such as:
Using the doggie door to enter a house...
If that does not work, many have figured out how to just open the back door...
Some have even figured out how to open the refrigerator...
After watching these videos, I naturally went in pursuit of any information I could find as to whether tortoise intelligence has been tested scientifically. In support of many pet owner claims, tortoises do exhibit signs of intelligence. In…
jgoldman | November 15, 2010
Have you ever been at a party with lots of people chatting away, when for some unexplainable reason you felt compelled to turn and look at the front door of your friend's house...and just as you were looking, someone was just coming in from outside and closing the door? You couldn't have heard the door open since there was so much noise already inside - more likely you noticed that other people were looking at the front door. All of this probably happened without any explicit intention or awareness. If several others are all directing their attention at a specific point in space, there might…
jgoldman | June 28, 2010She: "What are you writing about?"
Me: "Cognition in cold-blooded animals."
She: "Hot."
Most people who study cognition focus on mammals or birds. But I hope I've convinced you that other animals are important to investigate as well. One research group at the University of Vienna likes cold-blooded critters. Turtles and lizards and such. They argue:
Reptiles, birds and mammals have all evolved from a common amniotic ancestor, and as such they are likely to share both behavioural and morphological traits. However, this common ancestor lived around 280 million years ago and so it is equally…
jgoldman | June 17, 2010This video has been winding its way through the interwebs. It's pretty neat, but is it truly a case of tortoise altruism? Who knows. We don't know anything about those specific turtles or that specific situation. We don't know if they're kin, we don't know if they're trained, if they're pets or wild, we don't know what happened before the camera was turned on, or after it was turned off.
Even still, it's pretty cool.
edyong | November 26, 2008 Clad in hard, armoured shells, turtles have a unique body plan unlike that of any other animal. Their shells have clearly served them well and the basic structure has gone largely unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. But this unchanging nature poses a problem for anyone trying to understand how they evolved and until now, fossil turtles haven't provided any clues. All of them, just like their living descendants, have fully formed two-part shells.
But three stunning new fossils are very different. They belong to the oldest turtle ever discovered, which lived about 220 million years ago…