The discovery that the world’s most diverse mammalian order probably sprang from a European cradle 65 million years ago is more than a taxonomic footnote. It reshapes our understanding of how powered flight and echolocation co-evolved, clarifies the routes by which bats colonised every continent, and supplies a genomic toolbox that could illuminate the molecular bases of longevity and disease tolerance—traits with direct relevance to human health.
European Origin Revealed by Genomics
The Bat1K consortium, a global partnership of 137 scientists from 64 countries, produced chromosome-level, long-read assemblies for 103 bat species, representing all 21 recognised families. By integrating these reference-quality genomes with a curated set of 44 fossil specimens, the team applied joint phylogenetic-fossil modelling to pinpoint the earliest bat lineage. The analysis converged on a European origin at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, roughly 65 million years ago, predating the earliest known fossils by a few million years. This finding overturns earlier models that placed the cradle of bat evolution in North America, Africa or Asia, and it aligns with the oldest Eocene fossils recovered from multiple continents, suggesting rapid post-origin dispersal.
Genome-Fossil Synthesis Redefines the Tree
The scale of the genomic dataset is unprecedented: each assembly reaches chromosome-scale continuity, allowing reliable inference of gene families, structural variants and transposable-element activity across the order. Coupled with the fossil record, the synthesis resolved longstanding phylogenetic ambiguities caused by homoplasy and incomplete lineage sorting. The resulting tree clarifies the relationships among the 21 families, identifying a Europe-Africa hub that served as a launchpad for subsequent expansions into Asia, the Americas and Australia. By modelling both living and extinct taxa simultaneously, the researchers could date divergence events with tighter confidence intervals than any previous study, establishing a robust temporal framework for bat evolution.
Flight and Echoes Co-Evolved at Dawn
One of the most striking conclusions concerns the simultaneous emergence of powered flight and echolocation. The integrated dataset shows that the genetic architectures underlying wing morphogenesis and auditory specialisation were already present in the earliest divergences, implying that the two traits evolved in concert rather than sequentially. This challenges the long-standing hypothesis that echolocation arose later as an adaptation to nocturnal foraging. The finding is supported by conserved gene-regulatory networks identified across the 103 genomes, many of which are linked to sensory development and muscle physiology, suggesting a deep-rooted coupling of flight and acoustic perception.
