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Listen to a Jurassic Love Song

The love song of an extinct katydid that lived 165 million years ago has been brought back to life, according to a study in the latest issue of PNAS. The song is thought to be the most ancient known music documented to date.

The song was reconstructed from microscopic wing features on a fossil discovered in North East China. It allows us to listen to one of the sounds that would have been heard by dinosaurs and other creatures roaming Jurassic forests at night.

A veritable symphony of natural sounds must have filled the world 165 million years ago, with primitive crickets and croaking amphibians leading the way. These were among the first animals to produce loud sounds by stridulation, or rubbing certain body parts together. (We humans can do a version of this too, as this fellow demonstrates.)

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(To hear the Jurassic love song, the world’s oldest known music, Download Video_S1)