What are the Smartest Animals?
Here’s where the territory gets murkier. The animal most often cited are chimps, followed by the other Great Apes (gorillas and orangutans). Jane Goodall, a primatologist famous for her 45-year study of Tanzanian chimp social and family life, made a list of five of the smartest animals for USA Today: 1. Great Apes, which have learned parts of ASL (American Sign Language), and even taught it to each other. Furthermore, some Great Apes have been able to perform some basic functions on specially-designed computer programs, including solving certain problems involving colored shapes. 2. Whales and dolphins (cetaceans) are probably the smartest animals in the aquatic world. Like humans, cetaceans are capable of creating a mental image of and communicating with their fellows at great distances, using echolocation and special clicking noises. Some of these “songs” can be quite complex, and humans are at a loss to describe what they mean, though what has been uncovered is a testament to the an
