Cetaceans are well known for their remarkable cognitive abilities including self-recognition, sound imitation and decision making. In other mammals, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) takes a key role in such cognitive feats. In cetaceans, however, a PFC could up to now not be discerned based on its usual topography. Classical in vivo methods like tract tracing are legally not possible to perform in Cetacea, leaving diffusion-weighte...

Areas dedicated to higher brain functions such as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) are thought to be unique to hominidae. The OFC is involved in social behavior, reward and punishment encoding and emotional control. Here, we focused on the putative corresponding area in the sheep to assess its homology to the OFC in humans. We used classical histology in five sheep ( Ovis aries ) and four chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ) as a six...

Cetartiodactyls include terrestrial and marine species, all generally endowed with a comparatively lateral position of their eyes and a relatively limited binocular field of vision. To this day, our understanding of the visual system in mammals beyond the few studied animal models remains limited. In the present study, we examined the primary visual cortex of Cetartiodactyls that live on land (sheep, Père David deer, giraffe);...