In the northern forests of the Congo-Brazzaville, as the sun slips away, a distinctive honking fills the dusky sky. Every evening, thousands of hammer-headed fruit bats depart their daytime roosts in search of mates, calling out through large, box-shaped snouts that give the flying mammals the appearance of a winged moose. Here, along the Congo River, scientists have been collecting DNA swabs and tissue samples from the bats for years, working deep into the night in spacesuit-like protective gear.<\/p>\n
Those hard-won samples are now among the thousands of specimens gathered from bats across the world that have helped to reshape what we know about the bat family tree.<\/p>\n
A bat fossil found in Messel oil shale in Germany, that is about 47-48m years old. Photograph: Matthew F Jones\/Handout<\/p>\n
In a landmark study published today in the journal Nature<\/a>, a team of more than 130 international researchers combed through ancient bat fossils and genomic data from living species to establish that bats likely originated in Europe about 65m years ago \u2013 not in Africa, Asia or North America, as had previously been thought.<\/p>\n Rather, it seems that the earliest ancestors of modern bats dispersed from Europe into Africa, then expanded onwards to Asia, the Americas and Australia. The findings also reveal that echolocation, like flight, also evolved near the dawn of bat evolution.<\/p>\n \u201cBats, on a scale of amazing to amazing, they\u2019re super amazing,\u201d said Sarah Olson, one of the study\u2019s authors and director of health research at the nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Society. \u201cIt\u2019s fun to have part of that puzzle piece in the block, and then we can keep finding and adding other puzzle pieces to it now.\u201d<\/p>\n The Honduran white bat, or Caribbean white tent-making bat, one of more than 1,500 bat species. Photograph: Daniel Whitby\/Handout<\/p>\n The work is part of a larger global effort known as Bat1K<\/a>, launched in 2017, which seeks to sequence the genomes of all the living 1,500 bat species \u2013 the second most diverse mammal species in the world, and accounting for one-fifth of all mammals. Genomes are an organism\u2019s complete set of genetic constructions, containing all the DNA needed to build, grow and live.<\/p>\n The Nature study ultimately drew on 103 bat genomes from 21 bat families, alongside 44 fossil bats \u2013 mostly their teeth \u2013 unearthed across the globe.<\/p>\n Olson said their findings lay the groundwork for better understanding bat physiology and, critically, how the mammals have evolved to be so resistant to disease. Bats are often identified as reservoirs of fatal zoonotic viruses, including Ebola<\/a>, Nipah<\/a> and Marburg<\/a> \u2013 but the bats don\u2019t get sick themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cHow are they living with these viruses that, when they get into us, they cause so much damage?\u201d Olson said. \u201cWhat we have now is a kind-of code book of life.\u201d<\/p>\n A wooly horseshoe bat. The mammals have evolved to be particularly resistant to disease. Photograph: \u00a0\u00a0Manuel Ruedi\/Handout<\/p>\n A 2025 study<\/a> based on the Bat1K genomic work found that early bat ancestors seemed to have excessive immune gene adaptations. \u201cWe showed for the first time that these adaptations associated with viral tolerance and disease resistance probably evolved at the same time that all bats evolved,\u201d said the evolutionary biologist Ariadna Morales, who worked on both studies.<\/p>\n Bats are also unique among mammals in that they live exceptionally long for their size, showing few signs of ageing or cancers. Now, scientists say they will be able to investigate the genes driving those traits. What they learn could be a gamechanger for research into human ageing, immunity and disease resistance.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the genetic information that we can find in bats, it could be used to develop therapeutics associated with zoonotic disease. And they could also be models to develop treatments for cancer,\u201d Morales said.<\/p>\n Olson added that the research can also strengthen our understanding of \u201cwhat makes a healthy bat a healthy bat, and what are bats going to be susceptible to?\u201d<\/p>\n About half of the known bat species<\/a> have unknown or decreasing populations, with 18% of species considered threatened by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.<\/p>\n A lesser horseshoe bat. Almost a fifth of bat species are considered threatened. Photograph: Daniel Whitby\/Handout<\/p>\n Bats are at risk from the climate crisis, habitat loss, and bat persecution and harvesting, said study co-author Liliana D\u00e1valos, a conservation biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. At the same time, bats play an important role in ecosystems, helping to pollinate plants, spread seeds, and keeping insect numbers \u2013 particularly mosquitoes, another spreader of disease \u2013 in check.<\/p>\n \u201cUnlike most small mammals, all but one bat species have very small litters of one or two pups, so when individuals drop dead from scorching temperatures, or get killed through persecution or harvesting, populations cannot quickly recover their numbers,\u201d D\u00e1valos said.<\/p>\n And while bats have shown resilience to Ebola and Marburg, in Canada and the United States bats have perished by the millions<\/a> from a fungal pathogen called white nose syndrome<\/a>, which grows on the skin of hibernating bats.<\/p>\n \u201cThis research can help us go back and look at what makes the myotis bat species more susceptible to these fungal diseases,\u201d Olson said. \u201cThere may be some interesting findings that other researchers can take from this study \u2026 to go back and piece together what\u2019s happening with white nose syndrome.\u201d<\/p>\n Find more age of extinction coverage here<\/a>, and follow the biodiversity reporters Rebecca Ratcliffe<\/a>, Phoebe Weston<\/a> and Patrick Greenfield<\/a> in the Guardian app for more nature coverage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the northern forests of the Congo-Brazzaville, as the sun slips away, a distinctive honking fills the dusky…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":780179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-780178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/780179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}