The earliest Asian bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera) address major gaps in bat evolution- A Big Earth Data Platform for Three Poles

Since the evolution of flight ability, bats have experienced large-scale adaptive radiation and diffusion. Bat fossils have been known since the early Eocene in most continents. Bat fossils have not been reported in Asia since the Eocene. Here, we report two early Eocene bat tooth fossils from the Junggar Basin in Northern Xinjiang, China. It is the earliest known bat fossil record in Asia and may be the most primitive bat molar recognized at present. These teeth have both the common derivation of modern bats and the original characters found in other placental mammals, so it is of certain significance to reconstruct the evolution history of bats' teeth. The bat tooth fossils in Junggar Basin show that the tooth characteristics of this kind of basal Chiroptera onychonyteridae family are very advanced, but the skeletal anatomy of the posterior part of its head is more basal than that of other Eocene bats. The discovery of the early Eocene backbone type bats in Central Asia further suggests that this region is the evolutionary center of the transition type of early bats, which has been confirmed in other placental mammals, such as rodents and lepidoformes.

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Ni, X. (2021). The earliest Asian bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera) address major gaps in bat evolution. A Big Earth Data Platform for Three Poles, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2021.0185. (Download the reference： RIS | Bibtex )

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1.Jones, MF., Li, Q., Ni, X., & Beard, KC. (2021). The earliest Asian bats (Mammalia: Chiroptera) address major gaps in bat evolution. Biol. Lett. 17, 20210185. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0185 (View Details )

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