14 DAY TRIAL // In a paper published in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers present the love song that an extinct cricket used to call on his prospective mates more than 165 million years ago.
The species lived during the Jurassic Period, and was a “contemporary” of large dinosaurs. According to experts, the song this insect produced was part of the myriad of sounds that backdropped all Jurassic nights. A fossil belonging to the cricket was discovered in northeastern China.
In the research paper, entitled “Wing stridulation in a jurassic katydid (insecta, orthoptera) produced low-pitched musical calls to attract females,” experts detail a method they used to bring the song back to life, after analyzing microscopic features on the surface of the bug's wings.
University of Bristol scientists say that this is probably the most ancient song ever heard on the planet. This occurred at a time when primitive bushcrickets and croaking amphibians were just learning how to produce loud noises by rubbing parts of their bodies together; a process called stridulation.
In modern time, bushcrickets called katydids use a row of teeth-like structures on one of their wings on a plectrum located on another wing. While the mechanisms they use to produce sound are well understood, experts had a tougher time figuring out how their ancestors did the same.
UB School of Biological Sciences investigators worked closely with colleagues from the Capital Normal University in Beijing, China for the research. Leading insect evolution expert Michael Engel, from the University of Kansas, in the US, was also involved in the study.
The Chinese investigators were able to discover a bushcricket fossil belonging to an insect that lived in the mid-Jurassic Period, around 165 million years ago. The remnants were so perfectly preserved that team was able to make out microscopic stridulating structures on the surface of their wings.
Researchers named the new species Archaboilus musicus. The team concluded that the insect was most likely producing pure, single frequencies, rather than the more complex noises that characterize their modern counterparts.
“This discovery indicates that pure tone communication was already exploited by animals in the middle Jurassic, some 165 million years ago. For Archaboilus, as for living bushcricket species, singing constitutes a key component of mate attraction,” Daniel Robert explains
“Singing loud and clear advertises the presence, location and quality of the singer, a message that females choose to respond to – or not. Using a single tone, the male’s call carries further and better, and therefore is likely to serenade more females,” he goes on to say.
The expert holds an appointment as an SBS professor at UB.
