Bizarre walking bat has ancient heritage
A bizarre New Zealand bat that is as much at home walking four-legged on the ground as winging through the air had an Australian ancestor 20 million years ago with the same rare ability, a new study has found.
The discovery overturns a long-held held view that the agile walking and climbing skills of the lesser short-tailed bat - Mystacina tuberculata - evolved in the absence of any ground-dwelling mammal competitors or predators, says an international team of researchers led by Dr Suzanne Hand, a bat expert at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
