New Caledonian Crows Are Even Smarter and Scarier Than We Thought

In a 2018 paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of researchers showed evidence that New Caledonian crows, which have been observed making several types of tools out of sticks, may be able to build tools from memory — even if they have only seen the tool itself and haven’t ever seen the tool being constructed. This suggests that crows can form a mental template of tools based on other crows’ tools and their own past tools, which would explain why New Caledonian crows’ tools could have improved over time — via Inverse