Alex Taylor

Alex Taylor is a research fellow at Cambridge University and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Auckland. His work is focused on understanding how animal intelligence functions and evolves.

After studying at Oxford University he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to conduct a PhD at the University of Auckland. There he worked with the New Caledonian crow, an animal with the most complex tool manufacture of any nonhuman species, including primates. His work on this species has shown that far from being ‘bird-brained’, this crow can creatively solve problems requiring metatool use (the ability to use one tool to gain access to another) and even solve tool problems that the great apes fail at.

His current work involves studying New Caledonian crows and four other corvid species, as well as elephants and great white sharks, in order to understand how intelligence evolves.