Bats are the only mammals capable of powered flight and have correspondingly specialized body plans, particularly in their limb morphology. In new research published in PeerJ Life & Environment, ...

This study is led by Prof. Huabin Zhao (College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University). The origins of powered flight and laryngeal echolocation in bats are widely cited as evidence that ancestral bats ...

Phylogenies, fossils and functional genes : the evolution of echolocation in bats / Emma C. Teeling, Serena Dool and Mark Springer -- Systematics and paleobiogeography of early bats / Thierry Smith ..

Bats are flying mammals. Think about that. Many millions of years after birds hollowed out their very bones in pursuit of flight, some gliding, insectivorous squirrel-thing was born with a slight ...

For the past 25 years, Professor of Engineering and Biology Sharon Swartz and Professor of Engineering Kenneth Breuer ’82 P’14 P’16 have been fascinated by animal flight. The two professors have ...

When bats aren't flying, they often dangle from cave ceilings or the undersides of bridges. But why do bats sleep upside down? This topsy-turvy behavior may result from the evolutionary journey bats ...

Bats may have lived in caves and used soundwaves to navigate much earlier than first thought. Of all the mammals, bats have one of the poorest fossil records, with palaeontologists estimating that ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. Evolution is a long, slow and continuous experiment where ...