ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
The evolution of brain neuron numbers in amniotes.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers.
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Who cites it
57 citing papers in PubMed, 103 citations in OpenAlex.
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- T. rex cognition was T. rex-like-A critical outlook on diverging views of the neurocognitive evolution in dinosaurs.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2026Review
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- When a bigger brain is better: The case of bee olfactory learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Could Spatial Learning in the Early Stages of Life Consistently Affect the Long-Term Memory of Leopard Geckos (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Deficiency of vital organic nutrients in ecosystems limits brain development and fitness in wild fish.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Article
- Macroevolutionary brain scaling is a microevolutionary metaphenomenon.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Parental investment and body temperature explain encephalization in vertebrates.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Evolutionary expansion of the corticospinal system is linked to dexterity inbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Exceptional Visual-Opsin Coexpression and Phenotypic Diversity in Outer-Retinal Photoreceptors of Caenophidian Snakes.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2025Article
- Brain Connectivity Estimation Network for the Identification of Dementia.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Larger Fish Have Larger Brains With More Neurons Across but Not Within Cohorts Raised in Different Growth Conditions.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2025Article
- Traces of phylogeny and ecology in hippocampal neuron numbers.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Distribution of Serotonergic Transporter Innervation in the Nucleus Accumbens and Ventral Pallidum Is Highly Conserved Among Primates.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2025Article
- Influences of Diet Quality, Nursery-Habitat Complexity and Sex on Brain Development and Cognitive Performance of Brown Trout (Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Memory in Leopard Geckos (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Phylogenetically informed predictions outperform predictive equations in real and simulated data.Nature communications · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
SignificanceThe evolution of brain processing capacity has traditionally been inferred from data on brain size. However, similarly sized brains of distantly related species can differ in the number and distribution of neurons, their basic computational units. Therefore, a finer-grained approach is needed to reveal the evolutionary paths to increased cognitive capacity. Using a new, comprehensive dataset, we analyzed brain cellular composition across amniotes. Compared to reptiles, mammals and birds have dramatically increased neuron numbers in the telencephalon and cerebellum, which are brain parts associated with higher cognition. Astoundingly, a phylogenetic analysis suggests that as few as four major changes in neuron-brain scaling in over 300 million years of evolution pave the way to intelligence in endothermic land vertebrates.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.