Ronan first shimmied onto the world stage in 2013, when researchers at the university’s Long Marine Laboratory reported that, not only could she bob her head to a beat, but adjust her nods to tempos and music she hadn’t heard before. In this new study, to be published on May 1 in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, Ronan’s research team showed that her synchronization was as good or better than humans — and that her consistency in performing the beat-keeping task was better than that of humans.

To best match Ronan’s way of responding to a beat, a head bob, researchers asked 10 UC Santa Cruz undergraduates to move their preferred arm in a fluid, up-and-down motion to the beat of a percussive metronome. Three tempos were played — at 112, 120, and 128 beats per minute — with Ronan not previously exposed to 112 and 128 bpms.

At 120 bpm, Ronan’s most practiced tempo, she on average hits within 15 milliseconds of the beat, according to the new study’s lead author, Peter Cook, a longtime researcher with UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences. Ronan’s variability in timing beat-to-beat is also around 15 milliseconds. By contrast, the blink of a human eye takes about 150 milliseconds.

“She is incredibly precise, with variability of only about a tenth of an eyeblink from cycle to cycle,” said Cook, also a comparative neuroscientist at the New College of Florida. “Sometimes, she might hit the beat five milliseconds early, sometimes she might hit it 10 milliseconds late. But she’s basically hitting the rhythmic bullseye over and over and over again.”

The researchers emphasize that Ronan is in complete control of her participation. She is not deprived of food nor punished for choosing not to engage, and her training structure reflects this autonomy: She begins each session by climbing onto a designated ramp station, where she relaxes while waiting for the experiment to begin. Once ready, she positions herself and signals her readiness to start. If she chooses to disengage at any point, she is free to return to her pool without any negative consequences.

Recapping Ronan’s career

Ronan was born in the wild in 2008, but stranded repeatedly due to malnutrition. After three such strandings, and being spotted walking down Highway 1 in 2009, regulatory agencies finally deemed her to be non-releasable. So UC Santa Cruz adopted her in 2010 and she became a permanent member of the Pinniped Lab.

The lab, led by UC Santa Cruz research scientist and adjunct professor Colleen Reichmuth, uses cooperative training methods to study behavior and physiology in marine mammals. Resident research animals, including Ronan, participate in a wide range of projects that help teams explore their amphibious subjects’ inner worlds. Examples include studies on learning and memory, sensory biology, and diving physiology.

In other words, Ronan isn’t just working on her rhythm everyday in the lab. The team estimates that, over the past 12 years, she has participated in about 2,000 rhythm exercises — each lasting just 10 to 15 seconds. And sometimes, years went by between these sessions while she focused on other areas of research.

“She definitely wasn’t overtrained,” Cook said. “Realistically, if you added up the amount of rhythmic exposure Ronan has had since she’s been with us, it is probably dwarfed by what a typical 1 year old kid has heard.”

Ronan’s original rhythm study was inspired by work by Ani Patel, at Tufts University, along with colleagues who studied intermittent beat keeping in Snowball, a pet cockatoo who spontaneously “danced” to the Backstreet Boys. Because humans and cockatoos are both vocal mimics, the parrot work led to a theory that brain changes to support vocal learning were required for moving in time to music.

Sea lions haven’t shown the ability to learn new vocalizations, so Ronan’s 2013 study made a huge splash because it challenged the vocal-learning theory of rhythm. But in the study’s wake, some prominent theorists in biomusicality claimed that her performance was not as precise and reliable as human performance.

They suggested that Ronan might not be doing exactly what humans were, and that, therefore, she could not rely on the same biological mechanisms for perceiving and moving in time to rhythm. That prompted Cook and Reichmuth to test Ronan again to see if she had improved, and to compare her performance to people performing a similar task with the same sounds.

What they found, as reported in today’s new study, is that Ronan was more precise and consistent at every tempo they tested. And in a head-to-head battle of the beats with the UC Santa Cruz students, she more than held her own. The study’s authors then used the students’ performance to model the theoretical performance of 10,000 humans conducting the same rhythmic behavior.

Based on that model, Ronan was in the 99th percentile for beat-keeping reliability.

Now, at 170 pounds and age 16, the team says Ronan is “grown up and in her prime” for a female sea lion in managed care. Being with her day in and day out, over more than a decade, the researchers have become extremely attuned to Ronan. They know she is intelligent, but also exuberant. And just like us, her performance gets better with practice.

“One of the most important outcomes of the study is the fact that maturation and experience matter,” Reichmuth said. ” It’s not just a test of rhythmic performance. It reflects her cognitive behavior and her ability to remember and refine it over time.”

Another thing: Ronan also wants to perform well. Everytime she mounts her test platform, it’s because she wants to, Reichmuth explained. If Ronan’s not feeling it, there’s no test that day. “She’s motivated. To her, it’s a game she knows how to win,” Reichmuth said, “and she likes the fish that come with it.”

Ronan’s ripple effect

Ronan’s research progression has had far-reaching impacts in the scientific community, contributing to a growing body of work in comparative cognition. Her journey from an eager and curious orphaned sea lion to a key figure in rhythm-perception studies has exceeded all expectations. Her abilities challenge existing paradigms about which species can perceive and produce rhythm, opening new doors for research on the cognitive capacities of animals.

The team’s 2013 paper inspired follow-up studies across various species, including primates, elephants, birds, and yes, humans. As UC Santa Cruz researchers continue to analyze and share findings, they remain committed to fostering a broader understanding of rhythm perception across species — and Ronan’s recent work will further that goal.

Not a fluke

Ronan’s story is not just about one sea lion. A question Cook says he often hears is why can’t dogs dance. Our canine companions are frequently exposed to music, and yet, they don’t seem to respond with rhythmic movements like Ronan. Cook responds by asking his own question: How many people try to train their dog to dance in an explicit rhythm-based way?

The answer: not many. “If you’re going to say dogs can’t dance, you have to empirically assess that — really give the dog many opportunities to receive very precise feedback on rhythmic movement and see how they do,” Cook said. “I would be very surprised if you couldn’t get a border collie to do something like what Ronan does if you spend enough time on it.”

But this isn’t about teaching animals a cool party trick for fun. What Cook and researchers like him around the globe seek to better understand are the evolution of cognition, the universality of pattern recognition, and the intricate ways in which brains — both human and non-human — process the world around them.

“Ronan’s new study highlights the importance of experience, maturity, and really fine-grained training in a controlled laboratory setting to assess these questions,” Cook concludes.

Other co-authors of the paper include researchers Carson Hood and Andrew Rouse, who are also jointly affiliated with UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences and the New College of Florida.

These awe-inspiring flying reptiles of the Mesozoic era are often imagined soaring over the heads of dinosaurs. But new research shows that some of these ancient creatures were just as comfortable walking on the ground.

In a groundbreaking new study published today in Current Biology (1 May), scientists at the University of Leicester have successfully linked fossilised footprints to the types of pterosaurs that produced them. By using 3D modelling, detailed analysis, and comparisons with pterosaur skeletons, the team has shown that at least three different types of tracks match up with distinct groups of pterosaurs.

Tracks of giant ground-stalkers, comb-jawed coastal waders, and specialized shell crushers, shed light on how pterosaurs lived, moved, and evolved.

The new study supports the idea that pterosaurs underwent a major ecological shift during the middle part of the Age of Dinosaurs, about 160 million years ago, with several groups becoming more terrestrial.

Lead author Robert Smyth, a doctoral researcher in the in the Centre for Palaeobiology and Biosphere Evolution (School of Geography, Geology and the Environment at the University of Leicester), explained: “Footprints offer a unique opportunity to study pterosaurs in their natural environment. They reveal not only where these creatures lived and how they moved, but also offer clues about their behaviour and daily activities in ecosystems that have long since vanished.”

The study uncovered three distinct types of pterosaur footprints, each shedding light on different lifestyles and behaviours. By linking footprints to specific groups, scientists now have a powerful new way to study how these flying reptiles lived, moved, and adapted to different ecosystems across time.

Co-author Dr David Unwin from the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester explained: “Finally, 88 years after first discovering pterosaur tracks, we now know exactly who made them and how.”

Perhaps the most striking discovery comes from a group of pterosaurs called neoazhdarchians which includes Quetzalcoatlus, with a 10 m wingspan one of the largest flying animals ever to have existed. Their footprints have been found in coastal and inland areas around the world, supporting the idea that these long-legged creatures not only dominated the skies but were also frequent ground dwellers, inhabiting the same environments as many dinosaur species. Some of these tracks are present right up until the asteroid impact event, 66 million years ago, which led to the extinction of both pterosaurs and dinosaurs.

One group of pterosaurs, ctenochasmatoids, known for their long jaws and needle-like teeth, left behind tracks most commonly found in coastal deposits. These animals likely waded along muddy shores or in shallow lagoons, using their specialised feeding strategies to catch small fish or floating prey. The abundance of these tracks suggests that these coastal pterosaurs were far more common in these environments than their rare bodily remains indicate.

Another type of footprint was discovered in rock layers that also preserve the fossilised skeletons of the same pterosaurs. The close association between the footprints and skeletons provides compelling evidence for identifying the print makers. Known as dsungaripterids, these pterosaurs had powerful limbs and jaws, with toothless, curved beak tips designed for prising out prey, while large, rounded teeth at the back of their jaws were perfect for crushing shellfish and other tough food items.

Smyth explains: “Tracks are often overlooked when studying pterosaurs, but they provide a wealth of information about how these creatures moved, behaved, and interacted with their environments. By closely examining footprints, we can now discover things about their biology and ecology that we can’t learn anywhere else.”

When applying the algorithm to vertebral fracture assessment (VFA) images taken in older women during routine bone density testing, often as part of treatment plans for osteoporosis, the patient’s presence and extent of abdominal aortic calcification (AAC) was assessed.

The algorithm shortens the timeframe to screen for AAC significantly, taking less than a minute to predict AAC scores for thousands of images, compared with the five to six minutes it would take for an experienced reader to obtain the AAC score from one image.

During her research, ECU research fellow Dr Cassandra Smith found that 58% of older individuals screened during routine bone density testing presented with moderate to high levels of AAC, with one in four walking through the door unaware that they had high AAC, placing them at the highest risk of heart attack and stroke.

“Women are recognised as being under screened and under-treated for cardiovascular disease. This study shows that we can use widely available, low radiation bone density machines to identify women at high risk of cardiovascular disease, which would allow them to seek treatment.

“People who have AAC don’t present any symptoms, and without doing specific screening for AAC, this prognosis would often go unnoticed. By applying this algorithm during bone density scans, women have a much better chance of a diagnosis,” Dr Smith said.

Using the same algorithm, ECU senior research fellow Dr Marc Sim found that these patients with moderate to high AAC scores also had a greater chance of fall-associated hospitalisation and fractures, compared with those with low AAC scores.

“The higher the calcification in your arteries, the higher the risk of falls and fracture,” Dr Sim said.

“When we look at traditional falls and fracture risk factors, things like have you fallen in the past year and bone mineral density are generally very good indicators of how likely someone is to fall and fracture. Some medications are also associated with higher falls risks. Rarely do we consider vascular health when considering falls and fractures.

“Our analysis uncovered that AAC was a very strong contributor to falls risks and was actually more significant than other factors that are clinically identified as falls risk factors.”

Dr Sim said that the new machine algorithm, when applied to bone density scans, could give clinicians more information around the vascular health of patients, which is an under-recognised risk factor for falls and fractures.