Are We Alone for 01/19/09 - You Animal!

Are We Alone - Encore Presentation "You Animal!"
Maybe Dr. Doolittle was on to something; animals are smarter than we think. Birds, apes, and dolphins are all clever problem solvers with a rich vocabularly and - in some cases - self-awareness. Find out what you can learn from our furry, finned and feathered friends. Also, why you are so much an animal yourself, all the way down to the bare bones.

Plus, enter the locked vaults that hold extinct and newly-discovered animal species. And why B-movie critters steal the show.
(A new species? This is a grey-faced sengi. Click here for another photo.)

Guests:

• Neil Shubin - Anatomist and Associate Dean at the University of Chicago, and author of Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
• Galen Rathbun - Biologist, California Academy of Sciences
• Jack Dumbacher - Curator, Birds and Mammals, California Academy of Sciences
• Virginia Morell - Science writer. Her cover story Inside Animal Minds is in the March, 2008 issue of National Geographic
• Alex Kacelnik - Behavioral Ecologist at Oxford University
• Lori Marino - Behavioral Biologist at Emory University

You can listen to this and other episodes at http://radio.seti.org/, and be sure to check out Are We A Blog?, the companion blog to the radio show.