A worldwide community photographing and learning about wildlife
Project Noah Nature School
It's not dead. It seems like an empty shell of an organism that I can't ID. :(
This is the shed skin of a cicada. When the juvenile cicada (called a nymph) is ready to turn into the adult, it crawls from under the ground up a tree trunk, inflates it's body, causing the skin to split down the back. (you can see that split in your picture.) Then the adult form slowly emerges... a bit like a butterfly emerging from the chrysalis. The adult now has lovely wings! It has a very loud buzzy call... in fact it is the loudest sound in the insect world!
They are really very cool insects.
