In 1960 Jane Goodall made a discovery that changed forever the way researchers think of humans’ place within the animal kingdom. She observed  a chimpanzee bent a twig, removed its leaves, and used it to “fish” termites from their nest. What Jane Goodall witnessed was that chimpanzees, like humans, use and make tools. These extraordinary findings forced us to reconsider the key cognitive differences between humans and other animals. Since then, we have learned that tool use is a relative rare phenomenon in animals—less than 1% of the animal genera has been described to use tools- but it is taxonomically widespread. In fact, insects, marine invertebrates, fish, birds and mammals are the only taxonomic groups reported to use tools. But do all these animal tool behaviours reflect intelligence or are they a reflection of specialised mechanisms? A simplified view of the different cognitive processes and mechanisms underlying tool use suggests that whereas in invertebrates (including insects) and fish this behaviour is stereotyped (i.e., behavioural specializations to solve particular problems), in birds and mammals tool use is rather flexible (i.e., individual learning of the behaviour through object exploration and manipulation to then recombine the information to produce solutions to new problems).