An anatomical difference that arose very early in bats’ evolutionary history may have led to two groups evolving different lifestyles and forms of echolocation.
, but they both contain many echolocating bats. The groups are called the Yinpterochiroptera and the Yangochiroptera.
This created a puzzling question, says Luo. Either echolocation evolved twice, in each group, or it evolved just once in an ancestral bat species and was then lost in some lineages.Luo and his team have now identified an anatomical difference between the Yinpterochiroptera and Yangochiroptera. In the heads of mammals, signals are carried from the ears to the brain by a specialised set of neurons that run through a bony tube called Rosenthal’s canal.
This change meant Yangochiropteran bats could evolve more neurons to carry sound information, and could reorganise them more freely, compared with Yinpterochiropterans. This may explain why the Yangochiroptera have diversified into so many species, and why they echolocate in a different way to the Yinpterochiroptera, argues Luo.
However, the finding doesn’t resolve the question of whether echolocation evolved once or twice. “It’s still possible that echolocation evolved in the bat common ancestor before the split of these evolutionary lineages,” says Luo. But if that is the case, echolocation must have changed a lot during the early stages of bat evolution.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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