Neuro-anatomy

Parrots display striking behavioural and cognitive complexity, yet our understanding of the neuroanatomical foundations underlying these abilities remains limited. Working with vets and wildlife hospitals across Australia, we have been collecting brains from wild parrots that unfortunately needed to be euthanised because of injuries or other reasons. Thank you to all the vets that have participated - please contact us if you'd like to contribute to the this dataset!  

 We are currently analysing MRI scans of these opportunistically parrot brains. We aim to examine variation in brain size between species, and to identify the organisation of key regions linked to the evolution of advanced cognition in parrots.