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Clever Hans
The horse that made observer bias famous. Hans tapped his hoof until he seemed to have answered a question, but Oskar Pfungst found his accuracy depended on seeing a person who knew the answer. Tiny changes in the questioner's posture told him when to stop. The case changed how researchers guard against giving an animal the answer without realizing it.
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David Greybeard
In 1960 at Gombe, Jane Goodall saw David Greybeard use plant material to fish termites from a mound. She also observed him and another chimpanzee, Goliath, making tools for the job. Field observations like these gave scientists direct evidence that wild chimpanzees shape tools for a purpose.
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Betty the Crow
At Oxford, Betty bent a straight piece of wire and used it to lift a small bucket from a tube. The feat looked like an invention made on the spot. Later field research found wild New Caledonian crows also bend tool material, making Betty's achievement a case of using a species-typical behavior on an unfamiliar material.
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Alex (parrot)
Irene Pepperberg showed Alex pairs of objects and asked what was the same or what was different. He could name the relevant category, such as color, shape, or material, and could answer with a word for absence when no feature matched. That made his vocal labels a way to test what he understood about the objects in front of him.
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Chaser (dog)
After three years of work with John Pilley, Chaser could identify 1,022 objects by name. In further tests, she responded correctly when familiar object names were paired with different commands. The study measured two kinds of learning separately. One was recognizing the object a word named. The other was understanding what to do with it.
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Washoe (chimpanzee)
In 1969, Allen and Beatrix Gardner reported that Washoe could use manual signs in everyday interactions. Her case helped shift ape communication research toward a visual form that a chimpanzee could produce. The harder question was how much her signs showed about grammar and which parts of an exchange came from her human partners.
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Nim Chimpsky
Nim learned to make manual signs. When Herbert Terrace and his colleagues looked closely at films of the exchanges, they found that many of Nim's combinations followed a trainer's prompt or repeated a trainer's signs. They concluded the combinations gave little evidence of sentence structure, making the project a lesson in recording both sides of an interaction.
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Kanzi
Kanzi began using a board of graphic symbols while researchers were working with his mother, Matata. The researchers reported that he acquired some of the symbols through exposure rather than individual training. His case made how an ape learns a communication system a question worth studying alongside the number of symbols it can use.
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Happy the Elephant
At the Bronx Zoo, Happy used a large mirror to inspect a visible mark above her eye and repeatedly touched it with her trunk. She was the only one of the three elephants in the 2006 paper to do so. Her response gave researchers evidence that an Asian elephant could use its reflection to investigate a mark on its own body.
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Dolly (sheep)
Dolly was the first mammal cloned from a cell taken from an adult. It was a surprise because the donor cell had already specialized, yet its genetic information still supported development of an entire animal. The sheep on display at National Museums Scotland is Dolly's preserved specimen.
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E7 the Bar-Tailed Godwit
In 2007, a bar-tailed godwit marked E7 flew from Alaska to New Zealand in a little over eight days. Her satellite track covered about 7,260 miles of ocean without a stop. For scientists who had pieced together the route from sightings at either end, E7 supplied a record of the flight itself.
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Wisdom (albatross)
Ornithologist Chandler Robbins banded Wisdom as an adult on Midway Atoll in 1956. Later encounters with the same bird gave researchers an unusually long record of survival and breeding in the wild. Since she was already grown when first banded, 1956 marks the beginning of the record rather than the start of her life.
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Lonesome George
Found on Pinta Island in the 1970s, Lonesome George was the last known survivor of the island's giant tortoise species. Conservationists never recorded viable offspring from him. After his death in 2012, Ecuadorian and American institutions collaborated to preserve his body, documenting one unmistakable individual at the end of a species' known history.
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