By recording the “voices” of turtles and other supposedly quiet animals, scientists have concluded that all land vertebrate vocalizations have a common root that dates back more than 400 million years.
Think of the chattiest creatures in the animal kingdom and songbirds, dolphins, and—yes—humans probably come to mind. Turtles probably don’t register. But these charismatic reptiles also communicate using a large repertoire of clicks, snorts, and chortles.
Several years ago, University of Arizona evolutionary ecologist John Wiens and his graduate student Zhuo Chen started looking into the evolutionary roots of acoustic communication—basically defined as the sounds animals make with their mouths using their lungs.
“They really were able to get some very unusual recordings from some very unusual species,” says Fitch, who studies the evolution of speech., the star was the South American wood turtle , a fist-size species sometimes sold as a pet. It made more than 30 vocalizations, including a creaking door utterance used exclusively by males courting females and a squeaking, crying sound produced only by young turtles.
“That’s amazing!” says Elizabeth Derryberry, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who was not involved with the work. “It suggests that acoustic communication evolved in concert with lungs.”
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