I've studied various aspects of play behavior in a wide variety of nonhuman animals (animals) for decades, focusing mostly on members of the "dog family" (canids), while some of my students have ...

Bright-eyed, with her head tilted slightly, Tuli, a Colobus Monkey, put her hand on the indigo splotch on the canvas. While she enjoyed a snack, she dragged her fingers through the blue paint to leave ...

If you think of a game of fetch, you might picture a dog running back and forth, eagerly retrieving a ball. But a new, first-of-its-kind study in the journal Scientific Reports shows that they're not ...

Juvenile social play predicts adult reproductive success in male bottlenose dolphins, a new study has found. Juvenile social play predicts adult reproductive success in male bottlenose dolphins, a new ...

Interactions between these animals could help them live longer and better lives, he explains. “Play behavior in the events described in our study may facilitate an individual’s ability to cultivate ...

How important is play to an animal like a rat? It could be as essential as taking a breath. When scientists removed rats’ cerebral cortex, the brain area that governs higher cognition, the animals ...

Never underestimate the mind of a crow. Members of a family of birds that includes ravens, rooks, magpies, and jays, crows have been known to bend wire into hooks to retrieve food; drop nuts in a road ...

Growing up, James Serpell had a cat named Mungo with a penchant for pencils. “If a pencil or pen was on the floor, the cat would bring them to us,” he says. Then Mungo would sit and wait, hoping for a ...