Bats flew before they had ‘radar,’ fossil shows

NEW YORK — A fossil found in Wyoming has apparently resolved a long-standing question about when bats gained their radarlike ability to navigate and locate airborne insects at night.

The answer: after they started flying.

The discovery revealed the most primitive bat known, from a previously unrecognized species that lived about 52 million years ago.

Its skeleton shows that it could fly but lacked a series of bony features associated with echolocation, the use of high-pitched sounds to locate objects and prey in the surrounding environment, researchers said.

Until now, all the early known fossil bats showed evidence of both flying and echolocating, so it couldn’t be determined which ability came first, said researcher Nancy Simmons.

Her team’s research appears in today’s issue of the journal Nature. Simmons chairs the vertebrate zoology division at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The early bat’s wingspan was nearly a foot, just a bit less than that of today’s big brown bat, she said.

Its teeth show that it ate insects, which it evidently plucked off surfaces after seeing, smelling or hearing them, she said.

Simmons said she suspects that the bat was active at night but that there’s no evidence of that.

The creature was unusual in having a claw on all five fingers rather than just one or two.

Researchers dubbed it Onychonycteris (“clawed bat”) finneyi (after Bonnie Finney, the commercial collector who discovered the bat fossil in southwestern Wyoming in 2003).