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This is a scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher in Tagata.

The Animal Kingdom is a noisy place. There's Bird Song, Choruses of Frogs, and lots of lesser known

sounds like the Ray Gunn-like sounds of baby alligators, hatching, and calling for mom.

There's lots of videos of them doing this on YouTube if you're curious.

When I was a kid growing up, I had a pet alligator,

and it vocalized a lot.

John Weens, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Arizona.

So I had this baby alligator when I was a teenager and

you know sometimes you know I could hear,

er, er, er, er, er, er.

And when they grow up they do bellows and slaps and all sorts of sounds.

Wienes and his collaborator Joe Chen wondered why did animals start vocalizing in the first place?

Well one hypothesis was that the ability originated in

nocturnal animals, because, you know, sound works a lot better than colors or horns or

other visual cues when you can't see.

Wienz and Chen built an evolutionary tree

of nearly 1800 vertebrate species,

and they mapped onto it information

on whether each lived by day or night

...