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The Geekiest Animals in History

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the furry-pocket-protectors dept.

Flipper writes "CNET has compiled a list of the geekiest animals throughout history. The entries include such peculiar characters as Ham The Astrochimp (the first chimp in space), Schrödinger's Cat (used to demonstrate quantum superposition) and Hans, a horse who could apparently do complex mathematics and read words. The classics are there too, Pavlov's dogs get a well-deserved mention, as does Dolly The Sheep. What sounds like a pretty bizarre list is actually strangely interesting — some of these animals are seriously geeky."

8 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. How about the Trojan Horse? by stripmarkup · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Ok, it wasn't really an animal but it's still geeky.

    And how about the remote controlled goldfish?

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  2. Crickets Play Pacman by Fox_1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is a really neat research project using crickets as the ghosts in Pacman. Considering that crickets can tell the temperature and that they have the most sensitive mechano-sensors known in the animal kingdom, this is a creature that demonstrates many geeky qualities.

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  3. Shamu by mknewman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I went a Seaworld once and ate dinner at the Dinner with Shamu where you get to see their larger pool, and talk with the trainers. I asked him just how smart they really were and he said VERY smart. I asked how many commands they knew, and he said 300-400, which is really very amazing. They aren't usually mentioned in terms of the smartest animal, usually that's dogs, pigs and horses, but I bet Killer Whales are WAY up there, maybe even higher because of the size of their brain.

    1. Re:Shamu by Bertie · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, if you've ever seen the footage from the BBC's Blue Planet series of two orcas torturing a seal to death and then playing with the carcass, you'd have to agree. They tossed it back and forth between each other like it was a Frisbee. Then when they got bored of that, they took it in turns to wallop the poor critter as high in the air as they could using their tails. And boy, were they getting some loft on it. Can anybody else name an animal which plays both co-operative and competitive games of this level of sophistication (i.e. something more complex than playfighting)?

  4. My two votes... by NerveGas · · Score: 4, Interesting


        First would be Laika, who gave her life in space exploration. Second would be Freud's Chow-Chow. Determining the mental state of a patient through pheromones and other bodily odors gets two dew-claws up.

          On a somewhat related note of sniffing out people's mental state, one of my neighbors is a K9 cop. He said that several times, the cuplrit of a crime has stayed at the scene and just blended in with the crowd, and as soon as he showed up, without being given a scent or anything, his dog simply went straight into the crowd and picked out the party who turned out to be guilty.

    steve

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  5. Orally Book Covers by Hodge · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Surely the geekiest animals in history are going to prove to be the ones on the cover of the O'Reilly books.

  6. Koko by AaronW · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I was pleased to see Koko the gorilla on the list. When I was young I managed to see her when my father was doing some work to help the gorilla foundation back in the early 1980s. At the time, I wore braces and she found them very interesting and made up a new sign on the spot for them. They also had another gorilla, Michael. My sister made the sign "Koko loves Michael" to which Koko responded, "Michael dirty toilet", which apparently she came up with and was not taught. Koko was never very fond of Michael, though her attraction to some of her handlers was known even back then.

    -Aaron

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  7. I had a psychology professor... by Zelph · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...Who was on the team of scientists that trained the space monkeys. He told us some amazing stories about his experience. He said that they would starve them for a couple of days until they were downright hostile, and then they would drop a banana pellet into their chamber when the monkey would touch a joystick that was mounted in the chamber. Once the monkey figured out that the joystick = food, they would make the monkey hold the joystick for long amounts of time. Then they put a monitor in there with cross-hairs to simulate re-entry, and they would only give a banana pellet if the monkey could line up the cross-hairs. Pretty soon, they had a monkey that could hold some cross-hairs on a re-entry plane for 18 HOURS!!! (All the while the re-entry plane would be shifted and moved and bumped, to simulate the intense nature of re-entry. So when they finally sent the monkey into space (they had several canidates), they monkey knew exactly what to do to get the banana pellet.

    As a side story, some scientists took the task of training the monkeys to play tic-tac-toe. Our professor said that the monkeys would NEVER lose, once they were taught. Some of them were so smart that they could play without facing the tic-tac-toe board and just listen to the sounds of the game (they rigged it with unique sounds for each space) and reach back and pat the square when it was their turn.