Scientists made this discovery by chance in 2022.

A group of researchers bought a bunch of insects from a man who collects them in Brazil. Among these insects, they spotted one cricket that stood out.

They noticed that a unique cricket was pretty special – so special that no one had seen it for over 150 years.

The cricket, called the South American bush cricket, hadn’t been seen since 1862 when a naturalist named Henry Walter Bates described it. Klaus-Gerard Heller and Matthias Helb spilled the beans about this discovery in their study published on March 14 in the journal Zootaxa.

These two researchers stumbled upon this rare cricket by chance and decided to dig deeper. They found out that the cricket and its group have a complicated history because some scientists made errors while documenting them.

The mix-up caused a lot of confusion about what to call this cricket and how many of them were out there. The two scientists determined the species’ unique identification as Chlorocoelus hypericifolius. They also found more specimens of the species in museum storage.

Despite all this new info, the last time anyone officially saw this cricket was still way back in 1862.

What makes these crickets so special?

The insects are also unique in their unusual song. Bates describes the creatures, saying their song is “the loudest and most extraordinary” he’d ever heard from a bug like this.

The cricket that the researchers found in 2010 was tiny, measuring only about 0.3 inches long. But thanks to some more research, they found videos and photos online of this cricket chilling in places like French Guiana.

Heller and Helb were surprised to find out that this cricket was not as rare as everyone thought.

“Our accidental finding and the research thereafter showed that the (species) was never as extremely rare as described,” Heller and Helb said in their study.

“ … Indeed a large gap appeared until it was found again, first in 2015 based on eco-tourism, then by a commercial collector and by iNaturalist.”

There is another important thing about this species of the cricket.

Charles Darwin, the big-shot scientist, mentioned this cricket in his book back in 1871, using it as an example of something called “male sexual characters.”