The oldest known fossil of a singing cicada reveals that these insects were making music during the Eocene epoch — long before humans existed.
The fossil represents a new cicada species, Eoplatypleura messelensis, which lived about 47.2 million years ago. The discovery pushes back the timeline for when cicadas started to sing by about 17 million years and offers clues into the evolution of insect communication, scientists report April 29 in Scientific Reports.
“The fossil has been in the collection of the Senckenberg Museum since 1986,” says biological paleontologist Sonja Wedmann. It had been referred to as a cicada fossil back in 1988, but it was only when Hui
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