Scientists Recreated the Long-Lost Chirps of Jurassic Insects. Listen to the Simulated Soundscape of 165 Million Years Ago

With artificial intelligence and careful modeling of fossilized wings, researchers reproduced how some extinct, katydid-like insects might have made noise

Carlyn Kranking | Associate Web Editor, Science

September 3, 2026 4:08 p.m.

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Amid the footsteps of dinosaurs and the rustle of ferns in the wind, the soundscape of Jurassic forests would have been filled with the musical chirps of cricket-like insects—and some of those calls would have been too high-pitched for humans to hear.

Based on 165-million-year-old insect fossils, a team of scientists reproduced the sounds that these extinct creatures would have made, using close analysis of wing structures and artificial intelligence modeling. Their results, published on August 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also challenge a widely held idea about insect sound evolution.

“The world during the Jurassic Period was acoustically far richer and more diverse than previously thought,” study co-author Thorin Jonsson, a bioacoustician at the University of Graz in Austria, says in a statement.

Calls of Jurassic Insects

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Actual sounds from the Jurassic had no way to be preserved, and the voice-making organs of dinosaurs and mammals do not fossilize easily. But insects can offer key fossil clues to what the world of the dinosaurs sounded like.

Although humans might describe insects as “singing,” most of them—including crickets and grasshoppers—produce noise in a way that’s more akin to playing a musical instrument. This process, or “stridulation,” involves rubbing together body parts with ridged surfaces. Grasshoppers and katydids drag a leg across a wing, while crickets move one wing across the other.

So, while vocal cords don’t really fossilize, legs and wings can. “The beauty of fossil insects is that they can preserve their instruments and receptors on their tough external skeleton, unlike many other animals,” Edmund Jarzembowski, an associate scientist at London’s Natural History Museum who was not involved with the study but has researched Jurassic katydid sounds, tells Smithsonian magazine.

Scientists discovered 20 fossilized Jurassic insects with their wings intact in Inner Mongolia, China. The remains belong to nine species related to crickets and katydids.

To approximate the sounds that these structures would have made, the team examined their ridged features. The number of teeth, as well as the spacing between them and the size of the vibrating area on the wing, would have determined the pitch and rhythm of the insects’ calls.

The researchers analyzed these wings alongside the mechanics of modern insects’ stridulations, which they studied with lasers. They took into account the evolutionary relationships between these species and made computer simulations of how the prehistoric wings would have vibrated. An A.I. model predicted what each call’s pattern would have been like, based on the fossilized wing shape.

Most of the insects, the team suggests, produced low-frequency calls that aligned with what today’s crickets might emit—sounds that are around five kilohertz. Many of these were “pure tone” calls, or musical notes of only one frequency. They would have sounded more like clear and high-pitched chirps than hisses or buzzes, writes Science’s Richard Stone.

Strikingly, one of the species seemed capable of producing a sound between 20 and 22 kilohertz—a frequency that’s just above the human range of hearing. These ultrasonic chirps, produced by the katydid relative Sigmaboilus peregrinus, challenge a prominent idea: that predation by bats drove the evolution of ultrasonic calls in insects. S. peregrinus lived millions of years before the first bats did, suggesting that the flying mammals couldn’t have been the only driving force behind the onset of ultrasonic chirps.

Instead, the team suggests that predation by a wider array of other mammals and non-mammals might have led early crickets to evolve higher-pitched sounds—ones that could call to potential mates without alerting predators to their presence.

It seems to be “an absolutely plausible idea,” Robin Tinghitella, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Denver who was not involved with the research, says to Science. “There are lots of things that are listening in on insects.”

Alternatively, having an ultrasonic call might have helped some insects’ sounds stand out among a chorus of competing chirps from other species.

Moving forward, the study offers a roadmap for research that might uncover other elements of prehistoric soundscapes. “Perhaps A.I. will help us reconstruct other insect songs, too,” such as those of beetles and ants, says Jarzembowski. “Let’s look more closely at their fossils, as there’s a potential paleo-orchestra to be discovered.”

Carlyn Kranking is Smithsonian magazine's associate web editor for science.