A New Species of Bat Has Been Found, And It Flapped Around 16 Million Years Ago

There are a lot of bat species in the world today. Like, a ton of bats. We know of at least 1,400 species, and they make up around 20 percent of all current mammal species. It's the bats' world, we just live in it.

However, despite bats seemingly exploding onto the scene during the Eocene (the earliest bat fossil dates back to 52 million years ago), in a rapid diversification that has been described as "unprecedented", the bat fossil record is notoriously poor.

Any new find is incredibly valuable, helping to fill in the gaps in our understanding of their wild evolution. That's what a team of scientists led by palaeontologist Vicente Crespo of the La Plata Museum in Argentina has just found.

From the Ribesalbes-Alcora Basin in the Castellón province of Spain, the researchers have recovered the remains of ten bats - including those of a new species previously unknown to science.

"This constitutes, thus far, the first and largest collection of fossil bats from the early Miocene of the Iberian Peninsula," the team wrote in their paper.

They have named their new species Cuvierimops penalveri, in honour of palaeontologist Enrique Peñalver of the University of Valencia.

The fossil assemblage in which the bats were found dates back to over 16 million years ago, during the height of the Miocene, which ran from around 23 million to 5 million years ago. By the time the Miocene rolled around, mammals were already fairly well established; the fossil site once resembled a tropical forest, and numerous species of animals - including shrews, squirrels, dormice, hamsters and crocodiles - have been found fossilised there.

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