The fledgling seen from the side, with distinctive pale eyes and pink inside the beak, turning its head with beak open, while the parent places food in its beak

A fledgling carrion crow delighted to receive a piece of roadkill from a parent
#photography #birds

Eurasian magpie

A Eurasian magpie perched on a metal fence, seen from the back with its head turned to the camera. Bare skin patches caused by moulting can be seen on the head, while the shiny, colourful feathers of the tail and wing appear to be in pristine condition.

Punk in the front, fancy in the back

#photography #birds

📣 Interested in a 4-year postdoc in the movement ecology group? @univie.ac.at is recruiting outstanding female researchers through the E-STEEM programme. @pesumas.bsky.social is a registered host and welcomes applications from potential candidates.
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Side profile of a the head of a mute swan, gazing up, against a water background.

Mute swan

#photography #birds

New preprint out!🧪🌍🔥

I observed 17 bird species at two prescribed fires in Sweden. They appeared to mostly ignore the fire, and some (such as this skylark) even sang through the smoke - an important comparison with birds from fire-prone regions (reviewed here).

www.authorea.com/users/102018...

An Egyptian gosling feeding on grass and flowers, two of its siblings napping in the background

Egyptian gosling, nature's mowing machines
#photography #birds

I may have misunderstood, but I thought you were implying my unfamiliarity with the literature, and I certainly didn't mean to do so towards you.

Completely agreed. Regarding dinosaur cognition, tool use is much harder to infer than some other behaviours, and other aspects (e.g. neuroanatomy, physiology) leave more evidence while still informing cognitive reconstructions, which is why I believe tool use to be mostly irrelevant in this debate.

Then that we disagree on. I'm familiar with that literature and that's my conclusion. Does a sand-throwing antlion use the same cognitive abilities as a screwdriver-using human? I think the underlying cognition of these tool-use behaviours are vastly different.

It's absolutely fine to disagree about its use as a framing device, or the hypothesis in general, but I object to their inaccurate portrayal of our arguments. We highlighted points of agreement in our paper.

Yes, because we know from living systems that the mere fact of tool use, by itself and further unexamined, does not reveal much about cognition, and tool use can arise through many factors that are particularly hard to disentangle in long extinct animals.

Hard to say, but there are many things to consider. An inability to manipulate objects or lack of a nervous system, for instance.

Sorry, I should have phrased that better. The EBH is used to frame new approaches and evidence in hopes of moving this question forward. Was it your impression that it's central in our paper? That section barely touches on the arguments made by Caspar et al., which we even cite only once there.

Take locomotion, for instance. It's a crucial aspect to inform reconstructions of embodied cognition, and one that draws on many more lines of measurable evidence than tool use (especially when sporadic and involving perishable materials tens of millions of years ago). Trace fossils can inform both.

Our paper doesn't focus on the EBH at all. We merely use it - a hypothesis - to frame the debate and offer testable predictions. In my opinion, the core disagreement is about what brains are for, what cognition is, and why it evolves.

That is indeed my aim and I didn't intend to go into detail of what's just one example. The tool use issue, which we do disagree about on several fronts, is minor compared to other issues.

I agree with your points on paleo and best guesses. To answer your question with an example, based on neuroanatomy it would be extremely unlikely that the earliest sponges had visual model-based cognition, while that's more likely for the earliest birds.

The way I see it, these phrases express different degrees of likelihood, which is a crucial marker when making inferences.

I have, and it's a complex tool to wield. Regardless, there's a big difference between assuming and confidently predicting.

Agreed about the nuance. Here, you make a confident prediction that's not reasonably falsifiable while at the same time lamenting that too many unfalsifiable assumptions are being made.

In this context, that the basic binary distinction of tool user or not does not say much about (dinosaur) cognition, which instead can be better informed through other kinds of data and testable hypotheses.

Exactly, which is why I'm agnostic to that question, which is not an informative or relevant one to begin with. Just because T. rex had powerful jaws, it may still have used tools for various purposes, but it's unlikely there will ever be any evidence for or against it.

Fully agreed! We work with labs that do just that, while testing cognitive performance of varous taxa (including reptiles), to get a more complete picture encompassing both fields

Again, our paper speaks for itself just fine, but I take issue with how it's misrepresented by you, which is why I wanted to clarify our points. If you don't want to discuss it more, that's fine by me, but now readers can see what we actually claim.

The point, as said, is to provide a more accurate, complete picture of our paper. I could edit the review as standalone if it helps. After our review, not much changed in your paper, which remains inaccurate and condescending - including the pile of straw men.

Ah, thanks for the clarification.

Thanks, then this is probably relevant indeed

Sorry if it does - that was obviously not my intention. I figured it might work fine because there's no character limit.

Indeed, which makes one wonder how you can "confidently predict that a hypercarnivorous species like T. rex would have no need for tools"