Don’t take the news too badly, because Snowball the sulphur-crested cockatoo is a marvel of nature.

Rather than wandering onto the dancefloor at a wedding after a few shots of Dutch courage, like your average dancer (bonus points if Mandoza’s ‘Nkalakatha’ is playing), Snowball has become known around the world for his moves.

A full decade ago, he went viral after a video of him grooving to Backstreet Boys was seen around the world. Not content with being a one-trick pony, he’s developed 14 different dance moves in total.

The ‘side to side’ dance is straight from the ‘Dad Dances’ playbook, but others are a little more creative.

Via the Guardian, let’s see him boogie:

You’re impressed, we’re impressed, and so are those studying Snowball:

“We were amazed,” said Aniruddh Patel, a psychology professor at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. “There are moves in there, like the Madonna Vogue move, that I just can’t believe.”

“It seems that dancing to music isn’t purely a product of human culture. The fact that we see this in another animal suggests that if you have a brain with certain cognitive and neural capacities, you are predisposed to dance,” he added.

If a dung beetle can make use of a number of different cognitive functions to know where to roll turds, a bird can master the art of dancing.

After making contact with Snowball’s owners back in 2008, Patel has done two separate studies:

The first study showed that Snowball indeed anticipated the beat, bobbing his head and stomping his feet in time to the music. He kept on the beat when the music was slowed down and speeded up, his only encouragement being verbal praise from the sidelines.

After the research, Schulz noticed that Snowball was experimenting with new moves. That piqued Patel’s interest: it suggested that the beat was not simply triggering Snowball to make stock moves, but that he was choosing which moves to make…

Joanne Jao Keehn, a cognitive neuroscientist and trained dancer on the team, then used frame-by-frame analysis to note all the moves he made. While Snowball had danced to the tracks with his owner before, her style is apparently rather limited, suggesting the parrot may have drawn on his own interpretation of the music.

“He has this incredible repertoire. His movements to music are amazingly diverse,” Patel said.

The real kicker is that his owner admits to having a very limited repertoire – “nodding her head and waving her arms” – so Snowball is probably inventing the moves himself.

We finish with the exciting next step in this vital research project:

The researchers are now exposing Snowball to Billy Idol’s Dancing With Myself to see if he dances when there is no one in the room to offer encouragement. “We are testing that now,” Patel said. “People are fine listening to music on their own, but when it comes to dancing, people want to do that with friends rather than put music on in their living room and dance by themselves. We’ll see if Snowball is the same.”

I hope this inspires you to try something different at the next time you’re feeling the beat.

[source:guardian]