How do the world’s only flying mammals communicate? Researchers have observed young bats adopting new “dialects” simply by hearing them repeatedly, making them one of the few animals known to have a capacity for vocal (声音的) learning. “These bats may help us clarify the evolution of speech acquisition (习得) skills,” says Yosef Prat, a PhD at Tel Aviv University (TAU).

For one year, researchers raised 14 Egyptian fruit bat pups with their mothers in controlled area, exposing each young bat to two different vocalizations: the natural call of its mother and a separate recording that varied in pitch (音高) or frequency. They found that the pups in each group developed a dialect like the recording. “The general assumption in this field is that most animals develop their born vocalizations regardless of what they hear, and that human vocal learning abilities have developed during evolution,” says Mr Prat. “The finding that bats learn the common dialect in their rest place was unusual.”

Scientists know little about the origin of spoken language, which is believed to have appeared in humans within the past 500,000 years. Dozens of theories attempt to explain the complexity of this skill, but none have done so conclusively.

“Studying vocal communication and vocal learning in animal models is a very useful way to approach the problem,” says Olga Feher, an assistant professor at the University of Warwick in England.

But animal vocalizations and human speech are very different things, says Jamin Pelkey, a professor at Ryerson University. “All species communicate. Unlike other animals, though, human beings are able to use sound patterns for functions that are far stranger—functions that are imaginative, theoretical, and critical. When speech is involved in these stranger functions, that is what we mean by spoken ‘language’.”

In the movie Jurassic World (2015), a theme park filled with dinosaurs, was brought back from extinction through cloning.

Although the film is of course fictional, the methods used in it to bring animals back from the dead may soon become reality.

Scientists from Harvard University in the US are currently working on resurrecting the woolly mammoth, a mammal that became extinct around 4,000 years ago.

However, it wouldn’t be an exact copy of the hairy beast. “Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo,” Professor George Church, head of the team of scientists, told The Guardian.

“Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. We’re not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.”

The team is hoping to make a “mammophant” — a mix between an elephant and a mammoth. It would be like a regular elephant but have features from the mammoth that would make it more adaptable to cold weather.

So why go through all the effort and expense to bring back an animal that died out thousands of years ago? The answer lies in climate change.

It’s hoped that the creatures will stop frost in the world’s tundra (冻土带) from melting and releasing huge amounts of harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

“Mammoths used to keep the tundra from thawing (融化) by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in,” said Church. “In the summer, they knocked down trees and helped the grass grow.” Church and his team are attempting to mix mammoth DNA, recovered from frozen samples of the animal found in Siberia, with that of the Asian elephant, which is its closest relative.

“So far, scientists have managed to incorporate traits of the mammoth into elephant DNA. In a few years, they hope to make an embryo, but that’s a long way from creating a viable embryo,” Popular Science magazine wrote.

Although we may not be seeing woolly mammoths at the zoo any time in the near future, it’s still exciting to know that there is still the possibility of a real Jurassic Park someday, however tiny that possibility may be.

Otters (水獭) are known to be very social and intelligent creatures, but a new study by the University of Exeter has given new insight into their intellect.

Researchers gave otters “puzzle boxes (智力训练箱)”, some of which contained familiar food, while others held unfamiliar natural prey (猎物) — shore crab and blue mussels, which are protected by hard outer shells. For the familiar food — meatballs, a favorite with the Asian short-clawed otters in the study- the scientists had five different types of boxes, and the method to extract (提取) the food changed in each version, for example pulling a tab or opening a cap. The unfamiliar food presented additional problems because the otters did not know if the crab and mussels were safe to eat and had no experience of getting them out of their shells.

In order to decide whether food was safe and desirable to eat, the otters, which live at Newquay zoo and the Tamar Otter and Wildlife Centre, watched intently (专注地) as their companions inspected what was in the boxes and mimicked their behavior if the other otters sampled the treats.

However, they preferred to spend more time trying to figure out how to remove the meat from the shells on their own and relied less on the actions of their companions. Of the 20 otters in the study, 11 managed to extract the meat from all three types of natural prey.

“Much of the research into the extractive foraging (觅食) and learning capabilities of otters has centered on artificial food puzzles,” said the lead author, Alex Saliveros, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter’s Penryn campus in Cornwall. “Here, we were interested in investigating such skills in the context of unfamiliar natural food, as well as in relation to artificial food puzzles.”

Other animals employ social learning to decide what is safe to eat; rats, for example, prefer novel food types that they have smelled on the breath of other rats.

Scientists hope that understanding how otters cope with unfamiliar foraged food in their natural environment can help them train the animals to survive in the wild. “The captive (圈养的) otters in this study initially struggled with natural prey, but they showed they can learn how to extract the food,” said Saliveros. “Our findings suggest that if you give one otter pre-release training, it can pass some of that information on to others.”