Natural History of Bats

Origins and Relatives

Bat fossils have been found that date back approximately 50 million years, but, surprisingly, the bats of that ancient period very closely resembled those we know today. Thus, bats have been around for a very long time. Before humans began to affect their numbers, bats were extremely abundant. In some places they probably dominated the night skies just as passenger pigeons filled the daytime skies of the eastern United States prior to the nineteenth century. In the evolution of nature's system of checks and balances, bats long have played essential roles; their loss today could compromise the health and stability of our environment.

Bats are mammals, but such unique ones that scientists have placed them in a group of their own, the Chiroptera, which means hand-wing. All living bat species fit into one of two major groups, the Microchiroptera or the Megachiroptera. Members of the latter group are commonly referred to as flying foxes because of their fox-like faces. They are found only in the Old World tropics, while the Microchiroptera, which are highly varied in appearance, occur worldwide.

Like humans, bats give birth to poorly developed young and nurse them from a pair of pectoral breasts. In fact, Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, was so impressed by the similarities between bats and primates (lemurs, monkeys, apes, and humans) that he originally put them into the same taxonomic group. Today's scientists generally agree that primates and bats share a common shrew-like ancestor, but belong to separate groups.

A heated debate was recently triggered by the discovery that flying foxes, primates, and flying lemurs share a unique brain organization. (Flying lemurs, apparently close relatives of the true lemurs of Madagascar, are a poorly known group of cat-size gliding mammals that live in the Indonesian region and, like bats, are in a separate group of their own, the Dermoptera.) Did both the Micro- and Megachiroptera come from a single, shrew-like, gliding ancestor, or did the flying foxes evolve separately from primates? If the latter notion is correct, are their unique brain characteristics sufficient reason for reclassifying flying lemurs and flying foxes as primates? The issue remains unresolved, but most scientists agree that bats are far more closely related to primates than to the rodents with which they often are linked in the public mind.