According to new research at the University of Birmingham, in the UK, and Central European University, in Austria and Hungary, babies are not only capable of creative thinking well before starting to speak, but this sort of thinking may be essential for language acquisition.

In the study, published in PNAS, the researchers set out to explore the origins of human creativity and productive thinking to try to find out how people arrive at completely new thoughts and ideas. The basic mechanism for doing this is taking familiar concepts and combining them into new structures, but little is known about how early in life these abilities can be used.

The researchers found that babies were able to very quickly learn new words that describe small quantities — an impressive achievement — and combine these spontaneously with familiar words to fully understand a phrase.

Lead researcher, Dr Barbara Pomiechowska, carried out the research while a postdoctoral fellow at the Central European University (CEU). She is now an assistant professor in the School of Psychology, at the University of Birmingham, in the UK.

Dr Pomiechowska said: “Human creativity has no boundaries: it has taken us to the moon and allowed us to cure deadly diseases — but despite its importance, we don’t yet know when and how this impressive ability to combine ideas and invent new things emerges. This research shows that we must go right back to the beginning of language acquisition to solve this puzzle.”

In the study, the researchers worked with a cohort of 60 babies, all around the age of 12 months. They started by teaching the babies two novel words describing quantity: ‘mize’, to mean ‘one’, and ‘padu’, to mean ‘two’.

Then the babies were asked to combine these new number words with different object names, for example to identify ‘padu ducks’ from among a choice of images. By teaching novel words to represent quantities, the researchers were able to test the babies’ ability to combine concepts in real time, rather than simply recall combinations of words that they already knew from previous experience.

By using eye-tracking technology to monitor where the babies look, the researchers were able to show that the infants could successfully combine the two concepts to understand what they were being asked about.

Dr Agnes Kovacs, from CEU’s Department of Cognitive Science and CEU’s Cognitive Development Center, added: “For babies, this ability to combine different concepts is likely to help not only to interpret the complex language input, but also to learn about different aspects of the physical and social world. For adults, it’s an ability that helps to move past everything that’s already been thought of, opening the mind towards endless possibilities.”

The collaborative research team focused on a specific type of atmospheric wave, known as Convectively Coupled Kelvin Waves, (CCKWs), which are massive waves over 1,000-miles long that travel in Earth’s atmosphere along the equator and significantly influence global rainfall patterns. The study, published June 1, 2024, in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, provides researchers with a new way to study the behavior and attributes of these Kelvin waves in weather forecast models.

“Our findings suggest that improving the simulation of these Kelvin waves in weather models could enhance the accuracy of predictions for other high-impact weather features,” said Quinton Lawton, a recent graduate of the Rosenstiel School’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences and a lead author of the study. “This has the potential to provide communities, especially those in tropical regions, with more lead time and readiness for destructive weather.”

Utilizing NCAR’s high-performance computing system and cutting-edge weather models including the Model for Prediction Across Scales — Atmosphere (MPAS-A) and ECMWF’s Integrated Forecast System (IFS), the team simulated several Kelvin waves from 2021. One notable Kelvin wave over the Atlantic Ocean was linked to the formation of Tropical Storm Victor.

The study found that current weather forecast models poorly simulated an Atlantic Ocean CCKW, indicating a need for future improvements in weather forecasting systems to better predict these waves and, consequently, other extreme weather events.

The researchers introduced a novel methodology for modifying the strength of Kelvin waves in weather forecast models. With this new tool, researchers will be able to better quantify the characteristics and impacts of Kelvin waves, enhancing our understanding of how these waves are represented in weather forecast models.

Kelvin waves are now recognized for their role in increasing the likelihood of hurricane formation and triggering extreme rainfall events. In a previous study by Rosenstiel School scientists Lawton and Sharan Majumdar published in 2023, they explain how these waves can encourage tropical cyclone formation in the Atlantic.

This study represents the culmination of two years of collaborative research, originating from the lead student author’s PhD dissertation at the University of Miami. The work brings together expertise and resources from UM, NCAR, and ECMWF to push the boundaries of meteorological science.

“The research is a step towards better understanding and predicting the tropical atmosphere,” said study coauthor Sharan Majumdar, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the Rosenstiel School. “The study also highlights the need for further research into why current models struggle with accurately simulating these waves.”

“This exciting new species demonstrates that pseudosuchians were occupying coastal habitats on a global basis during the Middle Triassic,” said Dr. Nate Smith, lead author of the paper, and Gretchen Augustyn Director and Curator of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Capturing fossil life from the eastern Panthalassan Ocean of the Triassic, the locality that includes the Favret Formation is known for fossils of sea-going creatures like ammonites along with marine reptiles like the giant ichthyosaur C. youngorum — finding the newly described B. eremicarminis came as a bit of a shock.

“Our first reaction was: What the hell is this?” said co-author Dr. Nicole Klein of the University of Bonn. “We were expecting to find things like marine reptiles. We couldn’t understand how a terrestrial animal could end up so far out in the sea among the ichthyosaurs and ammonites. It wasn’t until seeing the nearly completely prepared specimen in person that I was convinced it really was a terrestrial animal.”

Pseudosuchian archosaurs have been unearthed in fossil beds from the shores of the ancient Tethys Ocean, but this is the first coastal representative from the Panthalassan Ocean and western hemisphere, revealing that these crocodile relatives were present in coastal environments worldwide during the Middle Triassic. Interestingly, these coastal species aren’t all from the same evolutionary group, suggesting that pseudosuchians (and archosauriforms more broadly) were independently adapting to life along the shores.

“Essentially, it looks like you had a bunch of very different archosauriform groups deciding to dip their toes in the water during the Middle Triassic. What’s interesting, is that it doesn’t look like many of these ‘independent experiments’ led to broader radiations of semi-aquatic groups,” said Smith.

During the Triassic, archosaurs, “the ruling reptiles,” arose and split into two groups with two surviving representatives: birds, the descendants of dinosaurs, and crocodilians (alligators, crocodiles, and gharials), the descendants of pseudosuchian archosaurs like B. eremicarminis. While today’s crocodilians are similar enough to be mistaken for one another by most people, their ancient relatives varied wildly in size and lifestyle. The evolutionary relationships of B. eremicarminis and its relatives suggest that pseudosuchians achieved great diversity very quickly following the End-Permian mass extinction — the extent of which is waiting to be discovered in the fossil record.

“A growing number of recent discoveries of Middle Triassic pseudosuchians are hinting that an underappreciated amount of morphological and ecological diversity and experimentation was happening early in the group’s history. While a lot of the public’s fascination with the Triassic focuses on the origin of dinosaurs, it’s really the pseudosuchians that were doing interesting things at the beginning of the Mesozoic,” Smith said.

The new species underlines the multiplicity of these ancient reptiles during the Triassic, from giants like Mambawakale ruhuhu to smaller animals like the newly described B. eremicarminis, which probably reached around 5-6 feet in length. Exactly how long B. eremicarminis was and how it survived along the coasts remains shrouded in the past. Only a few elements of the individual’s skull were found, and any clues to how it fed and hunted are similarly absent. What’s more clear is that B. eremicarminis likely stuck pretty close to the shore. Its well-preserved limbs are well-developed without any of the signs of aquatic living like flippers or altered bone density.

The research team wanted a name that paid respect to the original human inhabitants of the Augusta Mountains where the specimen was found, and so consulted a member of the Fallon Paiute Shoshone Tribe to decide on an appropriate name.”Benggwi-Gwishinga,” a word that means “catching fish” in Shoshone, was combined with the Greek word for Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile-headed god, to coin the new genus, Benggwigwishingasuchus. The specific epithet eremicarminis translates to “desert song,” honoring two supporters of NHMLAC who have a passion for the paleontology and opera of the Southwest. Thus, the full name is meant to translate roughly as “Fisherman Croc’s Desert Song.”