53 animals have had their voices added to a family tree of vocalizations in an effort to determine when acoustic communication came about.
50 turtle species, the South American lungfish, a limbless amphibian, and a reptile are some of the species that are being heard.
The authors concluded that all recorded species had a variety of sounds.
The ability to make vocal sounds is shared by many species in the turtle tree of life, suggesting it is ancestral to the whole turtle clade.
Researchers found evidence of a common origin of sound production and acoustic communication across all animals when they combined turtle data with an analysis of other animals.
Even though we don't have a lot of data on their sound production, Amphibians and reptiles are still making noise.
Researchers argue that we need to document the "key, neglected groups" if we want to understand acoustic communication.
This is what the study tried to find out. The authors were able to find many examples of acoustic communication in the literature despite only searching for sound production. Even with a limited sample size, the evolution of animal sound is much deeper.
The current theory on acoustic communication suggests that this trait has arisen multiple times across the animal tree of life. Birds and mammals have a wide variety of ear structures.
That is not correct according to a new analysis. The fact that animals so far apart on the tree of life produce the same sound in similar ways suggests that the skill is the same. It may have evolved once.
The trait dates back to an ancestors common to a wide variety of modern vertebrates that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. The link between lungs and swim bladders can be taken into account.
The results show that acoustic communication has a common and ancient evolutionary origin.
The findings remind us that even though an animal is hard to hear, we shouldn't stop listening to them.
The study was published in a scientific journal.
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