Scientists may have settled a decades-long debate about bat evolution, including controversial questions about when bats began to communicate and fly, a landmark study shows.
The new research, published Wednesday (Sept. 23) in the journal Nature, is the biggest bat DNA and fossil study ever conducted. Researchers created new, top-quality genome assemblies for 41 bat species, which they analyzed together with 62 existing sequences, providing a record dataset of 103 bat genomes and 44 bat fossils.
"It is extraordinary," study co-author Emma Teeling, a professor of molecular evolution and mammalian phylogenetics at University College Dublin, told Live Science in an email; "after decades of research and conflicting findings, we finally have uncovered how and when bats evolved."
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