TORONTO – If bats freak you out, you’re not going to like this.
Researchers have found the fossilized remains of a new type of bat — three times larger than today’s average bat — that lived 16 million years ago.
But wait. There’s more.
Not only was this bat significantly larger than today’s bats, it also walked.
This new bat belongs to a peculiar group of bats still in existence today, of the Mystacina genus. Amazingly, before this new discovery, the oldest fossil found was just 17,500 years old.
Get daily National news
READ MORE: How old are those fish? Creationist finds fossils while digging Calgary basement
The current relative of this newly discovered bat — the Mystacina tuberculata — lives in New Zealand’s old growth forests and is one of three species of bat that are native terrestrial mammals. Known as burrowing bats, these mammals forage on the ground under leaf litter and snow, moving around on their wrists and feet, which face backwards. They also fly.
This new species, called the Mystacina miocenalis, is believed to also have moved around this way. But weighing in at an estimated 40 grams, it was almost three times heavier than its living cousin.
“The size of bats is physically constrained by the demands of flight and echolocation, as you need to be small, quick and accurate to chase insects in the dark,” said Suzanne Hand from the University of New South Wales in Australia, co-author of the study. “The unusually large size of this bat suggests it was doing less in-flight hunting and was taking heavier prey from the ground, and larger fruit than even its living cousin.”
Though this bat was three times as large as the average bat, at least it wasn’t as big as the fox bat — those big suckers can weigh more than a kilogram.
The finding was published in the online journal PLOS One.
Comments