www.guardian.co.uk/.../2008/feb/13/bat.

evolution

Fossils solve mystery of bat evolution

James Randerson, science correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 February 2008 16.32 GMT
Article history

The oldest fossilised bats ever discovered have given palaeontologists an

unprecedented insight into the flying mammals' evolution. The find puts to rest a
long-standing argument over which came first, flight or echolocation - the bats' exotic
navigation system. The new species of bat could fly, but didn't use echolocation.
"When we first saw it, we knew it was special," said Dr Nancy Simmons at the
American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was part of the team. "It's
clearly a bat, but unlike any previously known. In many respects it is a missing link
between bats and their non-flying ancestors."
Scientists have wrestled with three alternative theories for the evolution of bats: flight
evolved before echolocation; echolocation came before flight; or both happened in
parallel. The new pair of fossils - which date from around 52.5m years ago - resolve
the issue.

"There has been much debate about how bats evolved, because there were no
specimens to address this issue," said Dr Kevin Seymour at the Royal Ontario
Museum in Toronto. "Now the combination of features seen in this species finally
gives us an answer: that flying evolved first and echolocation must have evolved
later."
Fluttering and gliding
The wing bones clearly show that the animal was capable of a combination of
fluttering and gliding flight. But its ear bones are not enlarged like those of modern
bats, which use them as part of their echolocation system.
The first fossil was discovered in August 2003 in a quarry in Lincoln County,
Wyoming, but the full scientific description appears for the first time in tomorrow's
issue of Nature. The species (dubbed Onychonycteris finneryi) is so odd that it has
been placed in a new taxonomic family. Its name means "clawed bat" with a nod to
the fossil's discoverer Bonnie Finney.
O. finneryi - which is around 12 centimetres from nose to tail - has claws on all five
of its fingers. Modern bats have claws on only one or two digits of each hand. Its
limb proportions are also unusual, with longer hind legs and shorter forearms than
other bats. The researchers believe it was well adapted for climbing in the canopy.
One unanswered question is how O. finneryi could have flown without being able to
echolocate. Also writing in Nature, physiologist Prof John Speakman of the
University of Aberdeen speculates that the earliest bats were day-fliers who used their
eyes to navigate.
"[They] were perhaps forced to become nocturnal by the appearance of avian
predators, shortly after the dinosaurs became extinct around 65m years ago. Some
then evolved echolocation, whereas others became nocturnal vision specialists."
www.animalpicturesarchive.com/view.php?tid=2...

Bat fossil solves evolution poser [BBC 2008-02-13]

[Photo] Onychonycteris finneyi is a medium-sized bat which dates to the early
Eocene epoch. The specimen is the most primitive bat known to science.
A fossil found in Wyoming has resolved a long-standing question about when bats
gained their sonar-like ability to navigate and locate food.
They found that flight came first, and only then did bats develop echolocation to
track and trap their prey.
A large number of experts had previously thought this happened the other way
around.
Details of the work by an international team of researchers is published in the
prestigious journal Nature.
Echolocation - the ability to emit high-pitched squeaks and hear, for example, the
echo bouncing off flying insects as small as a mosquito - is one of the defining
features of bats as a group.

There are over 1,000 species of bats in the world today, and all of them can
echolocate to navigate and find food.
But some, especially larger fruit bats, depend on their sense of smell and sight to
find food, showing that the winged mammals could survive without their capacity
to gauge the location, direction and speed of flying creatures in the dark.
The new fossil, named Onychonycteris finneyi, was found in the 52-million-yearold Green River Formation in Wyoming, US, in 2003. It is in a category all on its
own, giving rise to a new genus and family.
Its large claws, primitive wings, broad tail and especially its underdeveloped
cochlea - the part of the inner ear that makes echolocation possible - all set it
apart from existing species. It is also drastically different from another bat fossil
unearthed in 1960, Icaronycteris index, that lived during the same Early Eocene
epoch.
Many experts had favored an "echolocation first" theory because this earlier find,
also from the Green River geological formation in Wyoming, was so close in its
anatomy to modern species.
But the new fossil suggests this wasn't the case.
"Its teeth seem to show that it was an insect eater," said co-author Kevin
Seymour, a palaeontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada.
"And if it wasn't echolocating then it had to be using other methods to find food."
The next big question to be answered, he added, was when and how bats made
the transition from being terrestrial to flying animals .
Source: BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk