BATS all belong to one big family, say Norihiro Okada and his colleagues at
the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. Zoologists have long debated whether
the big Old-World fruit bats share the same ancestor as other bats or whether
they evolved independently from primates.
So Okada鈥檚 team compared the mitochondrial DNA of bats and other mammals.
They found that bats鈥攖he most diverse of all mammals鈥攄o share a
common origin. The family as a whole evolved very early, about 83 million years
ago, and their results suggest that Old-World fruit bats diverged from other
bats around 58 million years ago (Journal of Molecular Evolution, vol
51, p 318). 鈥淏ats really did witness the demise of the dinosaurs,鈥� says John
Altringham, a bat expert at the University of Leeds.