Forget everything you know about the history of bats. We’re guessing that won’t take too long.
A pair of researchers from Texas Tech have completely revolutionized what the scientific community thought previously about bats, including where the animals first came from.
David Ray, a professor and associate chair in Texas Tech University's Department of Biological Sciences, and doctoral student Francisco Castellanos were among the researchers who discovered that bats first took flight roughly 65 million years ago in Europe, around the time mammals were beginning to thrive and flourish following the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Ray said, “It's been a long-standing question as to where did bats originate.”
According to Chron, previous research had bats originating in North America, Africa, or Asia, but the research team used genetic information from 103 living bat species, representing all 21 bat families, and anatomical data from 44 ancient bat fossils to reconstruct bats' evolutionary family tree, and how ancient bats spread around the world.
"It's all from the fossils," Castellanos said.
Now the next big question this team wants to tackle: Which came first, flight or echolocation?
Ray says that his growing database of bat genomes will allow researchers to “dig deeper” into questions surrounding echolocation, immunity, and other traits that make bats so unusual.
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