Scientists just heard a grasshopper's song from 165 million years ago

Researchers have reconstructed the mating calls of nine grasshopper species that lived 165 million years ago, producing what they say is the oldest sound ever reproduced on Earth. The fossils came from Middle Jurassic deposits in what is now Inner Mongolia, and their sound-producing wing structures were preserved clearly enough for scientists to calculate the exact frequency, in hertz, each insect would have sung. The findings, published in PNAS, were led by Thorin Jonsson of the University of Graz with colleagues in the UK, China and the US. Crickets and grasshoppers make sound by rubbing wing ridges together, and the tiny teeth on those ridges act like musical notation. "Several species produced pure, low-pitched sounds like modern crickets, whilst others produced higher frequencies," Jonsson said. One relative of the katydid sang in ultrasonic range, above human hearing, millions of years before the first bat existed. Nobody yet knows who it was hiding from.