Jurassic cricket's song recreated Night-time in the Jurassic
forest was punctuated by the unmistakable sound of chirping bush
crickets. This is according to scientists who have reconstructed
the song of a cricket that chirped 165 million years ago. A
remarkably complete fossil of the prehistoric insect enabled the
team to see the structures in its wings that rubbed together to
make the sound. The international team report their findings in
the journal PNAS. Scientists from the US and China discovered
the tiny fossil and named their newly discovered species
Archaboilus musicus , because the music-making structures in its
body were so clearly visible. When insect expert Dr Fernando
Montealegre Zapata, from the University of Bristol, found out
that his colleagues had such a remarkable fossil, he was keen to
see it. "I was very surprised," he told BBC Nature, "because
those [structures] are very very small - at the microscopic
level." Dr Zapata studies sound production and communication in
living insects, working