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Jurassic crickets singing bass

22.02.2012

An international team of researchers say they have recreated the song of a cricket that lived 165 million years ago. This is the most ancient night song of the Earth, under which dinosaurs fell asleep in the parks of the Jurassic period.

It all started with the fact that Chinese paleontologists managed to find a fossil cricket that lived in the era of dinosaurs and is surprisingly well preserved. The cricket was named Archaboilus musicus, because on the wings of an ancient insect, a microscopic "musical instrument" remained intact and intact - comb-like structures that chirp when the wing is rubbed against the wing.

Upon hearing about the cricket, British insect expert Fernando Montealegre Zapata of the University of Bristol approached the authors of the find and asked permission to investigate it. Together with his Bristol colleague Daniel Robert, who, like himself, specializes in the biomechanics of song and hearing of insects, they studied the “combs” on the wings of a fossil cricket under a microscope, compared them with similar “tools” on the wings of 59 species of modern crickets and recreated a serenade , with which the ancient insect delighted the hearing of sleeping dinosaurs and at the same time called for a girlfriend.

The serenade is a pure note with a frequency of 6400 hertz. Each sound of her lasted 16 milliseconds. It was similar to the songs of modern crickets, but in a lower tone. We can say that the crickets of the dinosaur era were more bass. Their chirping could be heard from several tens of meters away - apparently, the "Jurassic" cricket needed to shout over the sounds of the night forest - the sound of waterfalls, the sounds of other insects, the chorus of frogs, etc. Such late-night singing, says Dr. Zapata, was a very risky business for the performer.

Feathered predators, like the same Archeopteryx, did not threaten the cricket, they hunted during the day, bats that love the cricket diet appeared on Earth a hundred million years later, however, small mammals of those times - such as morganukodon, an animal similar to a small rat - could well go to the sound of the song.

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