Advances in neuroimaging and neuroanatomy have yielded major insights concerning fundamental principles of cortical organization and evolution, thus speaking to how well different species serve as models for human brain function in health and disease. Here, we focus on cortical folding, parcellation, and connectivity in mice, marmosets, macaques, and humans. Cortical folding patterns vary dramatically across species, and individual variability in cortical folding increases with cortical surface area. Such issues are best analyzed using surface-based approaches that respect the topology of the cortical sheet. Many aspects of cortical organization can be revealed using 1 type of information (modality) at a time, such as maps of cortical myelin content. However, accurate delineation of the entire mosaic of cortical areas requires a multimodal approach using information about function, architecture, connectivity, and topographic organization. Comparisons across the 4 aforementioned species reveal dramatic differences in the total number and arrangement of cortical areas, particularly between rodents and primates. Hemispheric variability and bilateral asymmetry are most pronounced in humans, which we evaluated using a high-quality multimodal parcellation of hundreds of individuals. Asymmetries include modest differences in areal size but not in areal identity. Analyses of cortical connectivity using anatomical tracers reveal highly distributed connectivity and a wide range of connection weights in monkeys and mice; indirect measures using functional MRI suggest a similar pattern in humans. Altogether, a multifaceted but integrated approach to exploring cortical organization in primate and nonprimate species provides complementary advantages and perspectives. macaque | marmoset | neuroanatomy | cerebral cortex | neuroimaging C erebral cortex is the dominant structure of the mammalian brain and is implicated in a wide range of sensory, motor, cognitive, and emotional functions. Despite wide variations across species in size and morphological complexity, there are fundamental commonalities in cortical structure and function across all mammals. Most notably, cerebral cortex is a thin, layered sheet of gray matter containing a mosaic of cortical areas that differ in architecture, connectivity, topography (maps of sensory or motor domains), and/or function (1, 2).Our ability to investigate how cerebral cortex is organized and how it "works" has been greatly enhanced in recent decades by a growing arsenal of powerful and complementary experimental methods, both invasive (mainly applicable to animal models) and noninvasive (widely applicable to humans). Invasive anatomical, electrophysiological, and optical methods are available over a wide range of spatial scales (micro-, meso-, and macroscopic), and they provide a remarkably rich and diverse range of information. Many of these tools require complex genetic manipulations and hence are limited to genetically tractable species, especially the mouse but more recently also the m...