The concept of a mouse, as my Dad once told me, was developed by a designer working at Xerox Labs way back in the day, as an easier means of controlling the computer rather than button bashing. Apparently, he submitted his radical new design to his bosses, who turned down the idea, saying it would never fly. Now, the way Xerox worked at the time, if any developers or designers came up with ideas that they important people thought would make them money, they financed the projects - but they owned the rights to them. Having dismissed the mouse as being a bad idea, the idea's designer then had full rights to do as he saw fit with his invention. And so, he marketed it. And it took off. That's only what my Dad told me. Thought you might appreciate a bit of folklore preamble (I did for a long time believe that this was exactly the chain of events, but while the story's nuts and bolts were ... fairly correct, there's some big flaws... Thus follows the factually accurate explanation.) (This is from Wikipedia, as I couldn't remember alll of the dates :) --- begin ------ The mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute in 1963 after extensive usability testing. The first mouse was bulky, and used two gear wheels perpendicular to each other: the rotation of each wheel was translated into motion along one axis in the plane. Douglas Engelbart received patent US3541541 on November 17, 1970 for a "X-Y Position Indicator For A Display System". ---- end ------ You can find more Computer Mouse info on the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse Hope that goes at least some way to answering your question.

The computer mouse as we know it today was invented and developed by Douglas Engelbart, with the assistance of Bill English, during the 1960's and was patented on November 17, 1970. While creating the mouse, Douglas was working at the Stanford Research Institute, a think tank sponsored by Stanford University.

It's an animal. It was not "invented" by humans, or by any other animal for that matter.