How do you imagine walking through a Jurassic forest? If you are lucky enough to find a fossil-rich region like the Junggar Basin in Northwest China, you could turn to the fossil record to get an idea of the sizes and shapes of the animals you might encounter (1). You could look to fossils of plants to reconstruct the canopy—especially since in this region, many stumps were found in growth position, and there are megaplant fossils as well as fossils of seeds and spores. You could look through databases of fossils and findings and create a detailed computer model of the plant and animal life that you might see or touch as you walk. You could look to geological records to understand what temperature and humidity might have felt like. But how do you imagine the sounds, particularly the animal calls and songs? What do you hear in a Jurassic forest?

Continue reading “A Song from the Mid Jurassic”