Birds have been evolving separately from mammals for more than 300 million years, so it’s hardly surprising that their brains look quite different. But they do in fact have their own elaborate cortexlike neural system for complex behavior. In ornithological parlance, it’s called the dorsal ventricular ridge, or DVR. It arises from the same region of the embryonic brain during development as a mammal’s cortex does—the so-called pallium (Latin for “cloak”)—and then matures into a dramatically different architectural form.