Dancing parrots have revealed that humans aren't the only animals that can groove to different beats. Two new studies have found that parrots kept their dancing synchronised to human music, even when the rhythm changed.


It was previously thought that the human brain had evolved a special capacity for music, since other animals aren't commonly seen moving in time to sounds in the wild. But now researchers think that moving to a beat is linked the ability to mimic.

Adena Schachner and her colleagues from Harvard University surveyed over 1000 videos of dancing animals on YouTube and only found vocal mimics - parrots and one species of elephant - moving to music.

This supports the theory of Aniruddh Patel's group from the University of California, San Diego, that brain circuitry for complex vocal learning is necessary to follow a beat.

"A natural question about the results is whether they generalise to other parrots, or more broadly, to other vocal-learning species," says Patel.