New groundbreaking research from the University of St Andrews has created the largest combined bat genome and fossil study ever undertaken, finding that bats most likely originated in Europe around 65 million years ago, before spreading across the world.
The work also reveals that echolocation, like flight, evolved near the dawn of bat evolution, and lays the groundwork for research into the genetic basis of bats' exceptional longevity and disease resistance, with potential relevance to human health.
Published today (Wednesday 23 rd September) in Nature , an international team of 137 researchers from 64 countries, working together as part of the Bat1K consortium, combined genomic and fossil evidence to show that bats, and thus mammalian flight, most likely originated in Europe around 65 million years ago.
These results overturned previous hypotheses proposing Asian, African, or North American origins. Their earliest descendants then dispersed into Africa, establishing a Europe-Africa hub from which bats then expanded into Asia, the Americas, and Australia.
Covering 103 species and representing every one of the currently recognised 21 bat families, The team assembled the largest collection of high-quality bat genomes to date. Researchers combined state-of-the-art DNA sequencing and computational methods to generate and compare these genomes and identify the genes they contained. They combined them with 44 fossil bats from across the globe to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the world's only flying mammals. Building this dataset required samples collected over decades from bats across the world, including representatives of some of the rarest and most unusual bat families, found in the most remote locations.
Bats are among the most extraordinary mammals on Earth. They are the only mammals capable of true powered flight. Most bats orient and hunt in complete darkness using sound alone. With more than 1,500 species distributed across the globe, bats account for one fifth of all living mammals and play vital roles in maintaining healthy ecosystems by pollinating plants, dispersing seeds, and consuming vast numbers of insect pests.
Yet despite their extraordinary biology and ecological importance, scientists have struggled for decades to answer some of the most fundamental questions about bat evolution. Where did bats come from? How are the bat families related? When did flight and echolocation emerge? And how did bats evolve the unusual traits that set them apart from other mammals?
This study provides answers to many of these long-standing questions. The team analysed these genomes and fossils using novel methods and revised the bat evolutionary tree, resolving several long-running debates about how the major bat groups are related.
Senior author and Bat1K Director Professor Sonja Vernes, from the University of St Andrews, said: "Bats constantly surprise us. They are one of evolution’s greatest experiments. This extraordinary genomic resource - the culmination of years of international cooperation of Bat1K - is finally allowing us to understand how their remarkable biology evolved,”
Furthermore, many bat species show remarkable resistance to disease and live exceptionally long lives for their size. The genomic resource built for this study gives scientists the first robust evolutionary framework to investigate the genes behind these traits. This work could eventually inform human research into ageing, immunity, and disease resistance.
Senior author Professor Liliana M Dávalos, from Stony Brook University, said: “ The approach we used to model the evolution of fossil and living species together can do what other methods cannot: identify the oldest group of fossil bats while taking the genomic data into account, and uncover when and where bats originated,”
The fossil evidence also provides important clues about another long-standing mystery: when bats first evolved echolocation.
The placement of the fossil bat Vielasia within the oldest branch of the bat family tree indicates that echolocation predates the diversification of modern bats. The finding suggests that two of the defining characteristics of bat biology, echolocation and powered flight, were established near the origin of the group itself, helping explain the extraordinary evolutionary success of bats over the subsequent 65 million years.
The team also reconstructed the genome of the bat ancestor, showing what the first genome of a mammal capable of flight would have looked like.
This now gives scientists a genomic map for how one lineage of mammals evolved powered flight, advanced biosonar, exceptional longevity and unusual disease resistance, a foundation to trace the genetic basis of these traits with relevance well beyond bats.
ENDS
Nature
Meta-analysis
Animals
Reference genomes and fossils revise bat family phylogeny and biogeography
23-Sep-2026