{"fact":"Crows and ravens exhibit larger relative brain sizes compared to other corvids, suggesting enhanced cognitive abilities that may have contributed to their success in adapting to diverse environments.","context":"Additionally, extensive natural history accounts and ethological experiments suggest that Corvus may also excel in cognitive ability, a feature that is known to increase the ability to tolerate novel environmental conditions and exploit novel ecological opportunities. Relative brain size provides a principled way to compare cognitive capacity across bird species, as it is known to correlate positively with behavioural flexibility, learning, memory, neuron number, and the volume of pallial areas associated with general-domain cognition. We thus evaluated whether body size, relative wing length, and relative brain size increased in value with the origin of Corvus (around 10 Ma) and maintained comparatively higher values during the early burst of diversification of this genus.","source":"Joan Garcia-Porta; Daniel Sol; Matt Pennell; Ferran Sayol; Antigoni Kaliontzopoulou; Carlos A. Botero, Niche expansion and adaptive divergence in the global radiation of crows and ravens, 10.1038/s41467-022-29707-5","index":371}