Events

From July 29^th to August 9^th RZSS Edinburgh Zoo runs a Science Summer School for teenagers aged 16-18 yrs. It is a week long introductory course into zoo and wildlife sciences.

Last week some of our students were observing our two new mothers in the West enclosure. Both Santi and Lana have recently had babies. The students were investigating who the group would spend more time with. Lana (the alpha female) and her baby or Santi and her baby (the newer baby). They found that the two mothers spent the most time together and the rest of the group and Diego the alpha male spent equal amounts of time with both the mothers.

Our students concluded that this result is very similar to human mothers who like spend time together bonding over the daily gripes of raising babies.

Photo by : Kirsty Cheyne

On Friday April 26^th we had 23 science teachers from over 15 different Scottish Secondary schools come to the zoo to take part in a teacher training day.

The day’s events included training with two of our resource packs, Measuring Behaviour and Chimpanzee and Human Chromosomes. In the chromosome activity the teachers had a chance to compare the differences and similarities in the chromosomes of humans and chimpanzees, these resources are ideal for teaching students about genetic deletions, mutations and inversions.

In the Measuring Behaviour workshop they received an overview of how to study primate behaviour then went out into the zoo to study our primates themselves.

We got some fantastic feedback from the day and the teachers are very excited to start using our resources in their classrooms. In the future we hope to offer another training day for our other two resource packs; Working with Scientific Literature and Primate Communication.

St Andrew’s University is delighted to announce that Dr Josep Call will be presenting the Irvine Memorial Medal Lecture on Friday the 8^th of March 2013 at 5:15pm in School III, St Salvador’s Quad, St Andrews University.

All are welcome to attend this free lecture.

Dr Josep Call the Director of the Wolfgang Kohler Primate Research Centre, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig will be presenting on what makes us human and how has our cognition evolved. To explore these concepts Dr Call compares the behaviour and cognition of multiple species taking into account their evolutionary relationships and ecologies in order to enlighten us on how and why humans have evolved the way we have.