User:Outspan/tmp/Ethology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ethology (or Aethology) (from Greek: ήθος, ethos, "custom"; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge") is the scientific study of animal behavior, and a branch of zoology.
Although many naturalists have studied aspects of animal behavior through the centuries, the modern science of ethology is usually considered to have arisen as a discrete discipline with the work in the 1920s of biologists Nikolaas Tinbergen of The Netherlands and Konrad Lorenz of Austria. Ethology is a combination of laboratory and field science, with strong ties to certain other disciplines — e.g., neuroanatomy, ecology, evolution. The ethologist, a scientist who practices ethology, is interested in the behavioral process rather than in a particular animal group and often studies one type of behavior (e.g., aggression) in a number of unrelated animals.
The desire to understand the animal world has made ethology a rapidly growing field, and since the turn of the 21st century, many prior understandings related to diverse fields such as animal communication, personal symbolic name use, animal emotions, animal culture and learning, and even sexual conduct, long thought to be well understood, have been revolutionized, as have new fields such as neuroethology.