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According to Wikipedia, Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov, the person who decoded the Mayan script

...listed his cat Asya as a co-author on his work, but the editors always removed her. He always used the photo with Asya ... as his author photo, and got annoyed when editors cropped her out.

I gather that this wasn't a joke: he considered that he had learned something vital to his research, something to do with communication, by observing her teaching her kitten to hunt. I've searched on various combinations of words, and found a number of articles, mostly from cat lovers, but I still don't know what he learned.

I found the claim about the cat, and the cat's name, in the article Man Credited Siamese Cat with Helping Him Decipher Maya Script

Simon Crase
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Even the article you give a link to maintains it wasn't deciphering the Mayan script that Knorozov credited his cat with, it was his article ‘On Questions about Signaling Classification,’ 1973, which was devoted to the transformation of the animal communication into the human communication, and written years after the main part of the deciphering the Mayan script had been done. He observed his cat Asya teaching her kitten Fat Kys to hunt mice, which gave him some clues as for the differences between animal and human communication, so the deciperment of the Mayan script and his cat Asya (endearing form of Aspid “Cobra”) are not directly connected.

Yellow Sky
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    "Asya (endearing form of Aspid “Cobra”)" - really? – ngn Aug 13 '23 at 10:55
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    @ngn - The cat's full name was Аспид (Aspid) [ˈaspʲɪt] “poisonous snake of the Elapidae family, like cobra, mamba, krait, etc.; (fig., colloq.) villain, evil person”, from Greek ἀσπίς, ἀσπίδος. Ася (Asya) [ˈasʲə] was a short/endearment form of Аспид most probably coined by Knorozov himself and obviously intended to sound just like the human female name Ася (Asya) which is itself a short/endearment form of the name Анастасия (Anastasiya). – Yellow Sky Aug 13 '23 at 11:51
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    Ah, so it's about that particular cat, not the name in general (which can be short for many different names). Thanks. – ngn Aug 13 '23 at 14:29