Move over parrots, there’s a new animal on the dance floor. Her name is Ronan, and she’s a California sea lion at Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Scientists at the lab trained Ronan to bob her head in time with rhythmic sounds, then showed that she could transfer this skill to tempos and music she hadn’t heard before.

Ronan is the first non-human mammal convincingly shown to be able to keep the beat. Scientists call it “rhythmic entrainment,” and aside from humans it was previously seen only in parrots and other birds with a talent for vocal mimicry. Ronan’s sense of rhythm undercuts an increasingly influential theory that beat keeping requires a capacity for complex vocal learning, according to Peter Cook, a graduate student in psychology at UC Santa Cruz and first author of the study, published online April 1, 2013 in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Sea lions have limited flexibility in the sounds they make, and they are not known to be capable of vocal mimicry. “Ronan’s success poses a real problem for the theory that vocal mimicry is a necessary precondition for rhythmic entrainment,” Cook said.

Internet sensation

That theory had gained support from two 2009 studies inspired by a sulfur-crested cockatoo named Snowball, who became an Internet sensation after his owner posted a video of Snowball dancing to the Backstreet Boys. Researchers intrigued by the video had conducted a rigorous search for more dancing-animal videos and found that, at least on YouTube, parrots and their relatives accounted for almost every apparent case of beat keeping.

“The idea was that beat keeping is a fortuitous side effect of adaptations for vocal mimicry,