This paper is concerned with the existence of oscillatory waves in reaction–diffusion equations with nonlocal delay and crossing-monostability, which include many population models, and two main results are presented. In the first one, we establish the existence of non-monotone traveling waves from the trivial solution to the positive equilibrium. The approach is based on the construction of two associated auxiliary reaction–diffusion equations with quasi-monotonicity and a profile set in a suitable Banach space by using traveling fronts of the auxiliary equations. In the second one, we obtain the existence of periodic waves around the positive equilibrium by using Hopf bifurcation theorem.