A cockatoo has wowed scientists with his creative dance moves, revealing he can make up the dances as he goes along.
Snowball is a sulphur-crested cockatoo. He rose to fame in 2007 when a video of him dancing to the Backstreet Boys went viral.
Now, a team of scientists from Tufts University in Missouri have found Snowball can not only keep a beat, but he can make up routines on the fly.
Their findings were published in the journal Current Biology on Monday.
"What's most interesting to us is the sheer diversity of his movements to music," said the senior author of the research Aniruddh Patel.
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Researchers played two separate songs for the bird - Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper and Another One Bites The Dust by Queen.
Each song was played three times for Snowball and for each rendition he changed up his dances.
They include head banging, foot lifting, body rolls and shaking.
"Snowball seemed to favour movement diversity over synchronisation accuracy," the researchers say.
"His rhythmic movements often seemed not highly synchronised to the beat, possibly because he was primarily exploring new movements rather than exploiting old ones."
Snowball has 14 different dance moves, none of which have been taught to him.
In 2009, the same team of researchers declared Snowball (and other members of his species) the first non-human animals to be able to keep a beat to music.
Newshub.
