Gerry: And in changing the focus of the posts, here we have something on bats.

Regards,
Gerry

Silk: don'tcha think it's funny how mankind with
its anthropocentric view was nowhere to be found
52 million years ago & here this creature is on
the scene and in all probability will be after
mans demise. Some say bats are real loveable
creature & make great pets. Some say a lot of
stuff.

PARIS (AFP) - A nearly perfect bat fossil
unveiled on Wednesday, has settled a
long-simmering evolutionary debate: that the
animals could fly before they developed sonar to
track and trap their prey.

Most experts had thought it was the other way
around, according to the study, published in the
British journal Nature.
Echolocation -- the ability to emit high-pitched
squeaks and hear the echo bouncing off flying
insects as small as a mosquito -- was assumed to
be what made a bat a bat.
There are over 1,000 species of bats in the world
today, and all of them can ping the air with
sound waves.
But some, especially larger fruit bats, depend on
their sense of smell and sight to find food,
showing that the winged mammals could survive
without their amazingly capacity to gauge the
location, direction and speed of flying creatures
in the dark.
Dug out of limestone deposits in the state of
Wyoming in the western United States in 2003, the
new find is the oldest ever found -- and is in a
category all by itself -- giving rise to a new
Genus and Family.
Its large claws, primitive wings, broad tail and
especially its underdeveloped cochlea -- the part
of the inner ear that makes echolocation possible
-- all set it apart from existing species.
It is also radically different from another bat
fossil unearthed in 1960, Icaronycteris index,
that lived during the same Early Eocene period.
Most experts had favored an "echolocation first"
theory because this earlier find, also from the
Green River geological formation in Wyoming, was
so close in morphology to modern species.
A team of researchers led by Nancy Simmons of the
American Museum of Natural History baptised their
find Onychonycteris finneyi, based on the Latin
name for "clawed bat," in honor of its unique
prehensile feet.
They were amazed to find that, despite its
underdeveloped hearing, O. finneyi apparently did
not have a taste for fruit.
"Its teeth seem to show that it was an insect
eater," said Kevin Seymour, one of the authors
and a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum
in Canada. "And if it wasn't echolocating then it
had to be using other methods to find food," he
told AFP.
The next big question to be answered, said
Seymour, is when and how bats made the transition
from being terrestrial animals to flying.
O. finneyi's primitive wings -- more suited to
gliding than flapping -- provide a clue, he said,
but until scientists find an even earlier
ancestor, all they can do is speculate.
If they do find another specimen, there's a
reasonable chance it will be Green River site,
which has yielded a treasure trove of intact
fossils over the years.
Through a fluke of nature, the ancient lake was a
tailor-made trap for fish, and any hapless land
vertebrate that happened to fall in.
Occasional algae blooms, Seymour explained,
sucked up all the oxygen in the water, killing
the fish, which then sank to the bottom. At the
same time, lime leached out of the sediment and
settled over the fish.
"It is a perfect recipe for making fossils -- you
suffocate all the fish and then drop lime on top
of them," he said.



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