“Highly intelligent” capuchin monkeys delivered a passage of Shakespeare, reports BBC Wildlife.
University of Stratford researchers left a typewriter containing 26 letter keys plus 10 numerical digits in an enclosure at Oxford Zoo, it said.
After checking typed reels, they “discovered” the phrase “too b R n0t 2222 bee” – closely resembling Hamlet’s famed soliloquy.
Daniel Bennett, editor of BBC Science Focus, is quoted saying: “The thing with probability is that, just because something is incredibly unlikely, it still has a very real chance of happening.
“We’ve all experienced the thrill of throwing a run of sixes when playing a board game, and this is the same thing, albeit scaled up drastically. Just because the odds are heavily stacked against something, people still put huge bets on it happening.”