Bats originated in Europe, rewriting mammals’ family tree, study reveals — SkimNews
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- Bat1K researchers concluded in a Nature study by more than 130 international scientists that bats likely originated in Europe about 65 million years ago — not in Africa, Asia, or North America as previously thought.
- The study drew on 103 bat genomes from 21 families and 44 fossil specimens (mostly teeth), finding that the earliest ancestors dispersed from Europe into Africa, then expanded to Asia, the Americas, and Australia.
- Echolocation, like flight, also evolved near the dawn of bat evolution, the researchers found — upending prior assumptions about when the trait emerged.
- The Bat1K project, launched in 2017, aims to sequence the genomes of all roughly 1,500 living bat species, which account for one-fifth of all mammal species worldwide.
- Study authors Sarah Olson and Ariadna Morales said the genomic 'code book of life' could help develop therapeutics for zoonotic diseases like Ebola, Nipah, and Marburg, and serve as models for cancer and aging research — since bats tolerate these viruses without getting sick and show few signs of aging.
- Co-author Liliana Dávalos noted that about half of known bat species have unknown or decreasing populations, with 18% considered threatened by the IUCN, facing risks from the climate crisis, habitat loss, and persecution.
- In Canada and the United States, bats have perished by the millions from white-nose syndrome, a fungal pathogen — Olson said the new genomic data could help researchers investigate why myotis bats are particularly susceptible to such fungal diseases.
Why it matters: The study delivers a concrete genomic 'code book' that researchers say can be used to investigate why bats tolerate Ebola, Marburg, and Nipah without getting sick — with co-authors Olson and Morales explicitly pointing to future therapeutics for cancer, ageing, and zoonotic disease. With 18% of bat species already threatened and millions lost to white-nose syndrome in North America, the same genome map gives conservation biologists a tool to probe species-specific vulnerabilities while bats continue to pollinate plants and suppress mosquitoes.
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