 Questions about whether reptiles are conscious (and if so what their mental lives might be like) are especially interesting because birds are more closely related to them than they are to mammals, yet birds display a variety of behaviors that tend to intuitively suggest intelligence and emotion to human observers much more obviously than the behavior of scaly, so-called ‘cold-blooded’ animals like snakes and turtles. Do birds and mammals share mental features (consciousness, intelligence, emotion, social attachment) that are absent in reptiles? If so this would represent independent, convergent evolution of these phenomena. Alternatively, are these features common to all of these animals, but less obvious in some than others?