A new study has revealed a surprising lack of support for widely-held explanations of why some mammals evolve larger brains than expected for their body size.
The research, co-led by Flinders University’s Dr. Vera Weisbecker, argues that scientific understanding of mammalian brain size evolution may be seriously impeded by the impact of high brain growth costs.
The team homed in on the fact that large brains require a lot of energy to grow.
Orlin S.Todorov, a University of Queensland PhD student who led the study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, says many behaviors associated with large brain size – for example, parental care – are also related to reproduction, and raising of offspring.
