Rosa Rubicondior: Creationism Refuted - Bats Evolved In Europe - 65 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

New study reveals bats originated in Europe and rewrites the bat family tree | University of St Andrews news

Corynorhinus townsendii.

Credit: Elizabeth Clare.

Bats present creationists with a multitude of problems: firstly, there is the fact that they have a vastly more effective immune system than humans, so creationists need to explain why an omnibenevolent creator god would not give his favourite special creation, humans, the best available immune system. Secondly, there is the famous Bible blunder where, in most English language translations, bats appear to have been classified as birds (Leviticus 11:13-19) by the ignorant people who wrote it.

Now the facts have become even more difficult in the form of an awkward combination: remarkable adaptations that invite declarations of “design”, and an evolutionary history that researchers can investigate using evidence. Calling a bat a specially created “kind” explains neither its relationships with other bats nor when and where those relationships arose. Those are questions that require fossils, genomes and testable hypotheses.

Now, a major international study, published in Nature, has brought these questions into sharper focus. Researchers working within the Bat1K consortium assembled genomic data from 103 species, representing all 21 recognised living bat families, and combined this resource with anatomical evidence from 44 fossil bats. The university summarises their findings as pointing to a European origin for bats and mammalian powered flight around 65 million years ago — tens of millions of years before the supposed “Creation Week” of young-Earth creationism.

The research reconstructs a branching history of ancestry, migration and diversification. Its geographical model favours Europe as the ancestral region, followed by dispersal into Africa and subsequent expansion into other continents. These are historical inferences that can be tested and revised as further evidence becomes available.

The study also sheds light on echolocation: the ability to use returning echoes to detect surroundings and prey. The inferred position of the extinct bat Vielasia supports the conclusion that laryngeal echolocation — using calls generated in the voice box — arose before the diversification of the group containing all living bats. This places another celebrated bat adaptation deep within their evolutionary history.

There are limits to what this research establishes. The proposed geographical origin depends on the evidence and models used, and the study does not provide a complete fossil sequence documenting every stage between a non-flying mammal and a flying bat. An incomplete record, however, is not evidence of supernatural intervention. It identifies questions for further investigation.

That is the central difficulty for creationism here. Evolutionary biology supplies a framework within which researchers can compare explanations, uncover relationships and correct earlier conclusions. “A designer made bats” supplies no comparable account of their history. And revising a branch of the bat family tree offers young-Earth creationists no consolation: the debate concerns events in the Palaeocene, not events a few thousand years ago.

Craseonycteris thonglongyai from Thailand.

Credit: Charles Francis.

Cynopterus sphinx from Vietnam.

Credit: Charles Francis.

Rhinolophus ferrumequinum takes flight.

Credit: Daniel Whitby.

From Small Mammals to Powered Flight^ What Do We Know About Bat Evolution? Bats are the only living mammals capable of sustained powered flight. Their wings, sensory systems and aerial lifestyles evolved from those of non-flying ancestors, but the earliest stages of that transition remain incompletely documented. What can fossils, genomes and developmental biology tell us?

Did bats evolve from shrews?

Not from modern shrews, and there is no established evidence that their ancestors belonged to the shrew family. Describing an ancestral mammal as shrew-like refers to its probable appearance and lifestyle: a small, four-legged animal feeding largely on insects. It does not identify its evolutionary relationships.

Bats belong to the order Chiroptera, whereas shrews belong to Eulipotyphla, together with moles and hedgehogs. Both orders sit within the larger mammalian group Laurasiatheria. The old classification “Insectivora” grouped together various insect-eating mammals, but an insectivorous diet does not, by itself, demonstrate close ancestry. The precise non-flying ancestor of bats remains unidentified.

From climbing to flying

A climbing ancestor is a plausible starting point. Movement among branches could have provided opportunities for controlled falls, aerial manoeuvring and eventually gliding. Changes that improved these abilities could have been favoured by natural selection, without any foresight of the eventual evolution of powered flight.

However, this remains a proposed pathway rather than a complete, fossil-documented sequence. No continuous series of known fossils currently shows every stage from a non-flying mammal to a flying bat.

What early fossils reveal

One particularly informative early bat is Onychonycteris finneyi, from the approximately 52-million-year-old deposits of Wyoming’s Green River Formation. Its forelimbs show that it could already perform powered flight, but it retained claws on all five fingers and limb proportions consistent with effective climbing.

This combination of ancestral and specialised features provides evidence of evolutionary change within early bats. It does not mean that Onychonycteris was necessarily the direct ancestor of modern species. Fossils can illuminate an evolutionary transition while belonging to extinct side branches of the family tree.

How a mammalian forelimb became a wing

A bat’s wing retains the basic bones of a mammalian forelimb: an upper arm, forearm, wrist and fingers. Most of the fingers are greatly elongated and support a flexible membrane extending between the digits and towards the body and hindlimb.

Developmental research shows how changes in the activity of existing genetic programmes can alter limb growth and tissue development. A 2025 study of bat wing development, for example, identified the evolutionary reuse of a conserved developmental programme. This helps explain how inherited mammalian anatomy could be modified to produce a novel structure.

Which came first: flight or echolocation?

The original description of Onychonycteris interpreted its ear anatomy as evidence that powered flight preceded sophisticated echolocation. Later research questioned whether it entirely lacked echolocation, so the precise sequence remains debated.

The new Nature study, described in the University of St Andrews news release, places the extinct bat Vielasia within an early branch of the bat family tree. This supports the inference that laryngeal echolocation was present before the diversification of crown bats. It does not settle every question about the earlier origins of flight and biosonar.

Putting the evidence together

Genomes help reconstruct relationships among living bats. Fossils add extinct branches, anatomical information, ages and locations. Evolutionary models combine these sources to estimate when lineages diverged and where their ancestors lived. The resulting history is testable and open to revision: uncertainty about some early stages does not erase the evidence for common ancestry.

Brief glossary

Insectivorous

Feeding on insects; a dietary description rather than a statement of ancestry.

Phylogeny

The evolutionary relationships among organisms, usually represented as a branching tree.

Crown bats

The most recent common ancestor of all living bats and all its descendants, including extinct ones.

Stem bats

Extinct relatives more closely related to crown bats than to other living mammalian groups, but outside the crown group itself.

Laryngeal echolocation

Detecting objects through echoes of sounds produced in the larynx, or voice box.

New study reveals bats originated in Europe and rewrites the bat family tree
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.

Antrozous pallidus from USA.
Credit: Elizabeth Clare

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.

Corynorhinus townsendii.
Credit: Elizabeth Clare.

Published in Nature, an international team of 137 researchers from 64 countries, working together as part of the Bat1K consortium – co founded by St Andrew’s Professor Sonja Vernes and University College Dublin’s Professor Emma Teeling, both of whom were co lead authors – 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.

Artibeus intermedius from Belize.

Credit: Brock and Sherri Fenton

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.

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.

Professor Sonja Vernes, co-author
School of Biology
University of St Andrews
St Andrews, UK.

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.

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.

Professor Liliana M Dávalos, co-lead author
Department of Ecology and Evolution
Stony Brook University
New York, NY, USA.

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.

Publication:
Morales, A.E., Liang, Y., Thomas, W.R. et al.
Reference genomes and fossils revise bat family phylogeny and biogeography.
Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-11007-3

Abstract
Bats are extraordinary among mammals, having uniquely evolved powered flight and laryngeal echolocation, along with disease resistance, extended healthspans and the ability to hibernate1. However, the evolutionary history of bats and the understanding of these adaptations remain unresolved. We analysed chromosome-level, long-read genome assemblies from 103 bat species, including 42 new assemblies, representing all 21 bat families. This dataset, expanded in scope and assembly quality, yielded a new bat phylogeny. We placed Myzopodidae as the earliest branch within Vespertilionoidea, and resolved yangochiropteran relationships, identifying Emballonuroidea and Vespertilionoidea as sister groups. Our analysis revealed a mosaic evolutionary history across bats and explained why previous phylogenetic studies were misled. Chromosomal ancestral-state reconstructions supported 26 ancestral bat chromosomes. We integrated a morphological dataset of 699 characters for 65 species, including 44 pre-Quaternary fossils and representatives of most living bat families, with neutrally evolving genomic sites. Fossilized birth–death and dispersal–extinction cladogenesis analyses showed that bats, and thus powered flight, probably originated in Europe in the late Palaeocene, refuting African and North American origins. Placement of the fossil †Vielasia in the oldest ‘Eochiroptera’ clade indicates that laryngeal echolocation predates crown-bat diversification. Total evidence dating, including the fossil taxa, significantly reduced unrepresented basal branch lengths compared with molecular-only divergence estimates. By integrating comprehensive genomic and morphological datasets, analysed using innovative methods, we resolve long-standing controversies in bat biology and provide new insights into the evolutionary history and trait diversification of bats.

Fig. 1: Completion of phase 1 of the Bat1K project, including 103 chromosome-level genome assemblies and annotations representing at least one species from each of the 21 currently recognized bat families.

Values within each slice indicate the number of genome assemblies per family; the values adjacent to family names show species coverage (%) relative to all described species in that family. The outer colours indicate superfamilies; Myzopodidae is shown within Vespertilionoidea. The icons indicate feeding niche and echolocation capabilities in each family. Starting from the top and moving clockwise, illustrations correspond to the following families and species: Pteropodidae (Pteropus capistratus), Rhinopomatidae (Rhinopoma hardwickii), Megadermatidae (Lavia frons), Craseonycteridae (Craseonycteris thonglongyai), Rhinonycteridae (Triaenops persicus), Hipposideridae (Hipposideros diadema), Rhinolophidae (Rhinolophus megaphyllus), Nycteridae (Nycteris hispida), Emballonuridae (Saccopteryx leptura), Myzopodidae (Myzopoda aurita), Natalidae (Natalus stramineus), Cistugidae (Cistugo lesueuri), Molossidae (Eumops perotis), Miniopteridae (Miniopterus schreibersii), Vespertilionidae (Lasiurus cinereus), Mystacinidae (Mystacina tuberculata), Thyropteridae (Thyroptera tricolor), Furipteridae (Furipterus horrens), Noctilionidae (Noctilio leporinus), Mormoopidae (Mormoops megalophylla) and Phyllostomidae (Tonatia saurophila). All illustrations were hand-drawn by Fiona Reid. The Bat1K logo was designed by Peter Lang under a Creative Commons Universal Public Domain licence CC0 1.0. Images are not drawn to scale.

Fig. 2: Timetrees based on node-based and tip-dating approaches with geological timescales.

a, Mean divergence times from Bayesian analyses of coding sequences and fossil-based constraints on the T2 tree. The sister relationship between the superfamilies Emballonuroidea and Vespertilionoidea is also shown (i). C, Cretaceous; Q, Quaternary. b, Divergence times based on total evidence dating, including fossils as tips under the fossilized birth–death process, or tip dating, with posterior probabilities of key node support and 95% high probability density interval of posterior node age: (i) Chiropteran root placement. (ii) Oldest branching bat clade, Eochiroptera, including the laryngeal echolocating species †Vielasia highlighted in bold. (iii) Unnamed clade comprising the sister to the redefined Eochiroptera. (iv) Unnamed clade comprising both laryngeal echolocating species and the oldest bat inferred to feed on plants, †Aegyptonycteris, highlighted in bold. (v) Unnamed and smallest clade. (vi) Yinpterochiroptera. (vii) The sister relationship between the superfamilies Emballonuroidea and Vespertilionoidea, and (viii) Vespertilionoidea, including Myzopodidae.

Fig. 5: Paleogeographical origins and worldwide expansion of Chiroptera: Palaeocene–Eocene dispersal of bats from their area of origin.

a, Geographical origins of Chiroptera and the suborders Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera. b, Eocene-to-Oligocene dispersal of bat families. c, Fossilized birth–death tree, with dispersal–extinction cladogenesis biogeographical range posterior probabilities shown as pie charts at the nodes. Superfamilies included: Rhinolophoidea (Rhino), Noctilionoidea (Noctilio), Emballunoroidea (Emba) and Vespertilionoidea (Vesper). AU, Asia and Oceania; EA, Europe and Asia; EF, Europe and Africa ; EFA, Europe, Africa and Asia; FA, Africa and Asia; NE, North America and Europe; NEF, North America, Europe and Africa; NS, North and South America; PETM, Palaeocene–Eocene thermal maximum; SU, South America and Oceania. Extinct species are indicated in grey text. The chiropteran ancestor silhouette was vectorized by F.X.C. from an Onychonycteris illustration on Dinopedia (https://dinopedia.fandom.com) under a Creative Commons licence CC-BY-SA. The ‘Yinptero’ silhouette was vectorized by F.X.C. from an illustration of an unidentified species of the family Pteropodidae on Creazilla (https://creazilla.com) by Natasha Sinegina under a Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0. The ‘Yango’ silhouette was drawn and vectorized by A.E.M. under a Creative Commons licence CC-BY-SACC-BY-SA Silhouettes of Molossidae (Tadarida brasiliensis), Thyropteridae (Thyroptera tricolor), Nycteridae (Nycteris hispida), Mystacinidae (Mystacina tuberculata) and Rhinolophidae (Rhinolophus megaphyllus) were vectorized by F.X.C. from illustrations by Fiona Reid. Data for the continent illustrations were from PaleoMAP (https://chronosphere.info/data/paleomap/) under a Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0

Morales, A.E., Liang, Y., Thomas, W.R. et al.
Reference genomes and fossils revise bat family phylogeny and biogeography.
Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-11007-3

Copyright: © 2026 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

For young-Earth creationism, the difficulty begins with the timescale. This is a history unfolding over tens of millions of years, with ancestral populations diversifying, spreading between continents and leaving evidence in both their genomes and their fossil remains. Disagreements over the precise date or geographical location of bat origins do nothing to bring that history within a biblical chronology of a few thousand years.

For intelligent design creationism, the problem is explanatory. Calling flight and echolocation “designed” tells us nothing about when they arose, how they developed or why bats possess the particular pattern of relationships revealed by their DNA and anatomy. Evolutionary biology turns those questions into research programmes. It supplies hypotheses that can be compared with evidence and revised when better data become available.

There are still gaps, especially in the fossil record of the transition from non-flying mammals to powered flight. Acknowledging those gaps is part of scientific honesty. Neither this study nor evolutionary theory requires us to pretend that every ancestral species has been found. What remains unknown provides a reason to investigate, not a reason to insert a supernatural designer whose activities cannot be independently demonstrated.

The emerging picture is of an inherited mammalian body modified through successive generations, with no foresight of wings, biosonar or eventual worldwide diversification. Variation arose without regard to what future bats might need; natural selection favoured variants that worked under the conditions of the time. The remarkable results are becoming more comprehensible as the evidence accumulates. Creationism offers an assertion of agency; evolutionary science continues to uncover the history.

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