Bats can vanish withterrific efficiency , but walking is an entirely dissimilar story .
A typical bat eat on on the wing and sleep luxuriously above the reason — a lifestyle that does n’t ask much contact with flat terrains — and natural selection has molded the Brobdingnagian majority of bats into brilliant flyers and sub - par walker . Of the more than 1100 keep mintage presently live , only two can physically handle foresighted strolls across solid flat coat . One is the vampire squash racket , which use its well - developed limb to scat being tread down by the great animal it ’s sucking blood from . The other is New Zealand ’s lesser curtly - tailed squash racquet ( Mystacina tuberculata ) , which spend a full30 percentof its time found and looking forfood , foldingits wing up under a particular , protective membrane to keep them from mother in the way . Paleontologists know thatM.tuberculata ’s ancestors flew over from Australia , and , last calendar week , they receive a cue about when they might have arrived .
scientist recently discovered a prehistoric short - tailed bat specie , which they dubbedMystacina miocenalis , that trek through the body politic of the Kiwis between 19 and 16 million age ago . The animal had several of the same adaptations asM. tuberculatafor roaming about on its workforce and feet ( like beefy tree branch bone ) . ButM. miocenaliswas huge : At 39.2 gramme ( 0.086 lbs ) , it weigh three times more thanM. tuberculataand most mod bats . Thanks to that telling massiveness , the fauna has been knight “ Batman . ”
“ The outstandingly large size of this bat,”says Suzanne Hand , atomic number 27 - discoverer , team leader , and vertebrate fossilist at the University of New South Wales in Australia , “ suggests that it was doing less in - escape hunting and was taking prey heavier from the priming coat , and larger fruit than even its living cousin . ” Thestudywas release in a recent issue ofPLOS One .
