Research news: Bats took wing before landing radarlike sense

The News:
Bats took wing before landing radarlike sense
The discovery of a fossil in Wyoming seemingly resolves the question about when the creatures acquired their knack for nabbing insects at night.
By Malcolm Ritter The Associated Press
Article Last Updated: 02/13/2008 10:47:20 PM MST
NEW YORK — A fossil found in Wyoming apparently has resolved a long-standing question about when bats gained their radarlike ability to navigate and locate airborne insects at night. The answer: after they started flying.
The discovery revealed the most primitive bat known, from a previously unrecognized species that lived about 52 million years ago.
Its skeleton shows it could fly, but that it lacked a series of bony features associated with echolocation, the ability to emit high-pitched sounds and then hear them bounce back from objects and prey, researchers said.
Until now, all the early known fossil bats showed evidence of both flying and echolocating, so they couldn't reveal which ability came first, said researcher Nancy Simmons.
Her team's research appears in today's issue of the journal Nature. Simmons chairs the vertebrate zoology division at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. more...

The Research:
Read the research behind this story in the journal Nature.