"Mooom! Come and look!"

The kids were enjoying a little backyard time and next thing I know, "Moooom! Come and look, there's a bug the size of a potato!" Lol, well it's not the size of potato but just an exoskeleton of a some sort of beetle. I collected these when I was growing up so I called my mom to ask what it could be. Try katydid she said. Looked it up, nope. So can you tell me what this is? I always called them locusts. By the way, it claimed Danny's football, this was not staged. I'm a hero, you should have seen the pure amazement that I would reach down and pick up this weird looking potato buy like it was no big deal. Danny, who's only 3, said, "whoa!"

THANK YOU CAROLE!!! Thanks to Carole, see inside the comments, this has been correctly identified as a Cicada! A little impromptu science lesson for the kids. THANK YOU CHRISTIE! CHECK OUT THIS PHOTO OF A CICADA COMING OUT! http://boysplusacademy.blogspot.com/2007/07/cicada.html

A cicada also known as a "jar fly" is an insect of the order Hemiptera, suborder Auchenorrhyncha, in the superfamily Cicadoidea, with large eyes wide apart on the head and usually transparent, well-veined wings. There are approximately 2,500 species of cicada around the globe, and many remain unclassified. Cicadas live in temperate to tropical climates where they are one of the most widely recognized of all insects, mainly due to their large size and remarkable (and often inescapable) acoustic talents. Cicadas are sometimes incorrectly called "locusts"^[1], although they are unrelated to true locusts, which are a kind of grasshopper. Cicadas are related to leafhoppers and spittlebugs. In parts of the southern Appalachian Mountains in the United States they are known as "dry flies" because of the dry shell they leave behind.

Cicadas do not bite or sting, are benign to humans, and are not considered a pest. Many people around the world regularly complement their standard diet with cicadas: the female is prized for eating as it is meatier. Cicadas have been eaten (or are still eaten) in Ancient Greece, China, Malaysia, Burma, Australia, Latin America and the Congo. Cicadas are employed in the traditional medicines of China and Japan for hearing-related matters.^{[citation needed]}

The word cicada is a direct derivation of the Latin cicada. In classical Greek it was called a tettix, and in modern Greek tzitzikas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada