FireStormZ writes "According to Yahoo Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, highlighting the mental skills of some birds and confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals.
It had been thought only chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror.
But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies — a species with a brain structure very different from mammals — could also identify themselves.
"It shows that the line leading to humans is not as special as many thought," lead researcher Helmut Prior of the Institute of Psychology at Goethe University in Frankfurt told Reuters.
...
In particular, it had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, do not have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways.
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One has to wonder if we are a scant few weeks away from 'The Birds'"
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