It’s a Batty #ThrowbackThursday in honor of National Bat Week! Bats have been around for a while. In fact the oldest known bat fossil is around 52.5 million years old. (The oldest known mosquito fossil is around 79 million years old. Those poor early mammals didn’t have bats to help keep the population down like we do today!) The bat species named Onychonycteris finneyi was discovered in the Green River formation around Wyoming in 2003. It seems to be a link between long-armed mammals (e.g. sloth) and more modern bats. Fossils, like this one, that seem to be an intermediate between an ancestral organism and a more modern species are very important in filling in the gaps of the evolutionary tree. Unfortunately, here in the Keweenaw Peninsula, the geologic record from around 299 mya to around 12,000 years ago has been erased by erosional processes. We probably will never know if we had ancestral bats here or not. #batweek For more information on Onychonycteris finneyi visit: arstechnica/science/2008/02/earliest-bat-fossil-reveals-transition-to-flight/
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 13:00:33 +0000
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