{"id":37049,"date":"2026-09-26T10:29:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T10:29:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/?p=37049"},"modified":"2026-09-26T10:29:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T10:29:20","slug":"forget-asia-and-africa-bats-originated-in-europe-65-million-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/?p=37049","title":{"rendered":"Forget Asia and Africa: bats originated in Europe 65 million years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>A genomic study of 103 species and 44 fossils places the origin of bats in Europe 65 million years ago and dates the birth of flight and echolocation, in a Nature paper with CSIC participation.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For decades, it was assumed that bats had originated in Asia, Africa or somewhere in the Americas. A new study now calls that idea into question. According to its authors, <strong>the lineage arose around 65 million years ago in Europe<\/strong>, from where it spread to colonise the rest of the planet. In other words, the first bat species dates back to the age of the dinosaurs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The research, the most comprehensive carried out to date on this group of mammals, combines the <strong>genome sequencing of 103 species with the study of 44 fossils<\/strong>. The work forms part of <strong>Bat1K<\/strong>, an international consortium devoted to gathering genomic information on bats, and has been published in the journal &#8220;Nature&#8221; <em>(source in Spanish)<\/em>. On the Spanish side, researchers from the National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN-CSIC) and the University of Granada have taken part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ismael Galv\u00e1n, a researcher at the MNCN, sums up the scope of the study: <strong>it is the first time that the genome of a flying mammal has been reconstructed<\/strong>, and this resource offers the scientific community a solid framework for investigating the genes responsible for their most distinctive traits. He explains that this line of research could eventually provide useful information for studies on ageing, immunity and resistance to disease in humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Professor Liliana M. D\u00e1valos, of the University of Stony Brook, notes that the method used (jointly modelling the evolution of fossil and living species) makes it possible to do something other techniques could not: <strong>to place the oldest group of fossil bats while taking genomic data into account<\/strong> and thus determine when and where the group appeared. The data suggest that the first descendants of that European population dispersed into Africa, forming a Euro-African core from which bats later reached Asia, the Americas and Australia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A genomic study of 103 species and 44 fossils places the origin of bats in Europe 65 million years ago and dates the birth of flight and echolocation, in a Nature paper with CSIC participation. For decades, it was assumed that bats had originated in Asia, Africa or somewhere in the Americas. A new study [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37050,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37051,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37049\/revisions\/37051"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsreporters.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}