Fossil cricket: Jurassic love song reconstructed

Some 165 million years ago, the world was host to a diversity of sounds. Primitive bushcrickets and croaking amphibians were among the first animals to produce loud sounds by stridulation (rubbing certain body parts together). Modern-day bushcrickets – also known as katydids – produce mating calls by rubbing a row of teeth on one wing against a plectrum on the other wing but how their primitive ancestors produced sound and what their songs actually sounded like was unknown – until now.