News Release

By studying the wing properties of a 150-year-old holotype, scientists discover that a relict group of singing insects produced pure-tone songs at low frequencies which could travel larger distances, advancing our understanding of ancient soundscapes

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

An artwork showing a reconstruction of the inset studied.

image: This species was described some 150 years ago, based on a single specimen, which is deposited in the Natural History Museum in London. No other species have been found since, and the specimen is highly deteriorated. Based on the recoverable features, this drawing shows how the insect might look in real life. view more 

Credit: Charlie Woodrow, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0270498

Article Title: Reviving the sound of a 150-year-old insect: The bioacoustics of Prophalangopsis obscura (Ensifera: Hagloidea)

Author Countries: U.K., Austria

Funding: This study was funded by a European Research Council grant no. ERCCoG-2017–773067 and an NSF - NERC grant no. NSF DEB-1937815 - NERC T014806/1 to FMZ.TJ is supported through the European Commission via a Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship (829208, InWingSpeak).


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