IT turns out that the biggest animals do not necessarily have the biggest brains, contrary to what you might think.
A new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, which analysed a huge dataset of brain and body sizes from around 1,500 species, has challenged long-held beliefs about brain evolution.
The study revealed that the largest animals do not have proportionally bigger brains, with humans being an exception, having evolved more than 20 times faster than all other mammal species.
Humans were not the only species to buck the trend though, with primates, rodents, and carnivores also showing a tendency for relative brain size to increase in time.
"For more than a century, scientists have assumed that this relationship was linear - meaning that brain size gets proportionally bigger, the larger an animal is," said Professor Chris Venditti, lead author of the study from the University of Reading.
"We now know this is not true.
"The relationship between brain and body size is a curve, essentially meaning very large animals have smaller brains than expected."
Dr Joanna Baker, co-author of the study also from the University of Reading, believes brains could be prevented from getting too big because they are "simply too costly to maintain" beyond a certain size, however, more research is needed.
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