Aside from their association with vampires, many people no longer look at them as they used to, as they have also been cited as the source of COVID-19.
Even though we remember bats with these evil features, how did these strange beings that have been floating in the air for millions of years come to be?
The first fossils of bats date back to the Eocene period, almost 50 million years ago.
As a result of their researches in different regions, paleontologists came across the teeth and skeletons of bats in many regions such as North America, France, Australia and India.
But the bats’ forms have not always remained the same: There are differences between their modern relatives when compared to their ancient fossils. The ears of fossils are very different from the ears of the bats we know today.
While evolved bats only have claws on their thumbs, fossils show that a bat could have five claws.
A fossil thought to be 52 million years old, named Onychonycteris, found in Wyoming, USA, was found in the form of five claws.
In addition to the fact that bats have existed all over the world since ancient times and have almost similar forms, there was a question that intrigued the scientific world: when did the only flying mammal have wings.
Many creatures in the past evolved to take on their present forms, just as whales have a similar past.
Primitive bats are known to live in forested ecosystems, where fossils cannot leave any remains, according to Emily Brown of the University of Birmingham. So there is a gap in the history of bats and the records are incomplete.
Even looking at the oldest bat fossil, its claw structure reveals that it is a bat. According to paleontologists, the oldest bat species alive today is the “rat-tailed bat”. This species takes the position of fluttering in the air rather than moving from the ground like the bats we know.
So actually it doesn’t have as complicated an answer as we expected! The fact that the records of bats are not formed due to the ecosystem is also challenging for scientists.
As we explained above, bats fluttering in the air, taking the ideal flight position, and soaring in the sky explains the bats’ flying start. Unfortunately, before new fossils are discovered, what science can offer is limited with this information.
Other mammals make it easier for us to infer about bats. Because these gliding species, such as flying squirrels and lemurs, can prove that bats evolved in this way, too.
The mysteries of these creatures, whose mystery we talked about at the beginning of our article, still continue. If enough fossils can be found when scientists make new discoveries, we can explain more clearly how these mysterious animals got wings.
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