A new paper appearing in Biology Letters describes the oldest-known fragmentary bat fossils from Asia, pushing back the evolutionary record for bats on that continent to the dawn of the Eocene and boosting the possibility that the bat family’s ‘mysterious’ origins someday might be traced to Asia.

 

A team based at the University of Kansas and China performed the fieldwork in the Junggar Basin -- a very remote sedimentary basin in northwest China -- to discover two fossil teeth belonging to two separate specimens of the bat, dubbed Altaynycteris aurora. The new fossil specimens help scientists better understand bat evolution and geographic distribution and better grasp how mammals developed in general.