In the paper, Patel and his team list the five traits they believe are required for an animal to be able to spontaneously dance to music: vocal learning; the ability to imitate; a propensity to form long-term social bonds; the ability to learn a complex sequence of movement; and an attentiveness to communicative movements. Humans and parrots share all five.

“We think these five together in an animal brain lay the foundation for an impulse to dance to music with diverse movements,” said Patel, who noted other animals can do some of the five things but not others. Monkeys, for example, can imitate movements but have very limited vocal learning capacity, he said, and thus can’t move rhythmically to music. “It’s unusual for all five things to come together, and when they do it means a brain is primed to develop dancing behavior if it’s given exposure to music with rhythm and beat.”

Ever the skeptical scientist, Patel initially wondered whether Snowball might simply be copying the moves of his owner, Irena Schulz, who dances with him from time to time. But, Schulz, who has a master’s degree in biology and has been a willing research partner, said she only makes a limited number of motions while getting down with her fancy-footed bird. In addition, Snowball was never rewarded with food during the research, said Patel. Instead, he seemed to be dancing for social reasons, and for the pure fun it.

“Dancing has a deep social component,” said Patel, “and for him, dancing seems to be a social thing.”

Though the initial videos were made in 2009, Patel put the work aside to focus on a new job and a move across the country. But a few years ago, he was inspired to take another look when he read a scientific paper suggesting the term “imitation,” when used to describe something one species appears to mimic from another, implies a complicated biological process. Even if Snowball was emulating a human’s dance moves, Patel realized, he was translating those movements into a completely different motor system, solving what scientists call the “correspondence problem.”

“If he is actually coming up with some of this stuff by himself, it’s an incredible example of animal creativity because he’s not doing this to get food; he’s not doing this to get a mating opportunity, both of which are often motivations in examples of creative behavior in other species.” — Ani Patel

That itself “would be remarkable,” said Patel. Equally impressive, he added, is the possibility that the bird is creating the new moves on his own.

“If he is actually coming up with some of this stuff by himself, it’s an incredible example of animal creativity,” said Patel, “because he’s not doing this to get food; he’s not doing this to get a mating opportunity, both of which are often motivations in examples of creative behavior in other species.”

Patel thinks his cross-species work could help answer the longstanding question of whether musicality is an evolved part of human nature or purely a cultural invention that builds on brain circuits that have evolved for other reasons, a subject his new book will explore.

But the work could do more than just help solve a Darwinian debate. Patel suggests additional research with songbirds (which, like parrots and humans, are vocal learners with strong auditory-motor brain connections) could help shed light on why rhythmic therapies can improve brain function in patients with neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, stroke, dyslexia, and stuttering.

“There are connections between timing and rhythm and several other important brain functions we use on a day-to-day basis, like movement, speech, reading, and motor control,” Patel said. “So unraveling the mechanisms of rhythm processing in an animal model where we can measure things at the cellular and circuit level is a potentially powerful way to help advance rhythm-based interventions for neurological disorders.”

Happily for his fans around the world, Snowball, who is only 23 and could live for another 50 years or more, is going to keep on dancing.