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Vocal learning, the ability to imitate sounds, is a trait that has undergone convergent evolution in several lineages of birds and mammals, including song-learning birds and humans. This behavior requires cortical and striatal vocal brain regions, which form unique connections in vocal-learning species. These regions have been found to have specialized gene expression within some species, but the patterns of specialization across vocal-learning bird and mammal species have not been systematically explored.

Identifying molecular brain similarities across species. Brain region gene expression specializations were hierarchically organized into specialization trees of each species (blue lines), including for circuits that control learned vocalizations (highlighted green, purple, and orange regions). A set of comparative genomic algorithms found the most similarly specialized regions between songbird …