Bat Origins: Where Did The First Bat Evolve?

Publication Info:

Transcript:

Emma Teeling, Reference genomes and fossils revise bat family phylogeny and biogeography, Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-11007-3.

The origins of bats as a group has always been a mystery, but thanks to new genetic research we may finally know where the first bat was born!

Episode 349

Notes:

So, you might already know that this is more closely related to this than it is to this. And no, don't think about echolocation. That has nothing to do with it. But, do you know where bats came from? Because the story of bat origins is tricky and until now has been a mystery. People have been trying to figure out the origin of bats pretty much since it became clear that they weren't just flying rats. By the way, bats are not rodents. They're especially not rats. Bats are members of the order Chiroptera, which is much more closely related to animals like carnivorans, like cats and dogs, or even ungulates, like cows, or like I said, whales, than it is to rodents. But, the fact that they are the second largest group of mammals that span throughout pretty much our entire planet is part of why it was tricky. Because there have been multiple proposed origins for bats, like Africa, Asia, or North America. I mean, we know they were in North America 50 million years ago because we have fossil evidence. But anyway, thanks to brand new research, we might finally have the answer. And this research did not come easy. This research was conducted by 137 researchers from 64 different countries, members of the so-called Bat 1K Consortium, in an effort to find the origin of bats. Which meant they needed genetic data from all 21 living families of bats. And they used genetic data from 103 different species. And thanks to this new groundbreaking research, it looks like bats evolved in Europe 65 million years ago, almost immediately following the end Cretaceous mass extinction. And this was the origin of mammalian echolocation and flight because both of these features came along pretty early in bat evolution, allowing them to quickly disperse first into Africa and then all over the globe. As usual, if you want more information, here's the source.