World's oldest bat hunted without sonar A nearly perfect bat
fossil, the oldest ever found, lacked a key feature seen in most
bats: the ability to hunt and navigate using a kind of sonar.
The finding, settles a long-simmering evolutionary debate: first
came flight, and only then did bats develop echolocation to
track and trap their prey. Most experts thought it was the other
way around, according to the study in today's issue of the
journal Nature. Echolocation, the ability to emit high-pitched
squeaks and hear the echo bouncing off flying insects as small
as a mosquito, was assumed to be what made a bat a bat. There
are over 1000 species of bats in the world today, and all of
them can ping the air with sound waves. But some, especially
larger fruit bats, depend on their sense of smell and sight to
find food, showing that the winged mammals could survive without
their amazingly capacity to gauge the location, direction and
speed of flying creatures in the dark. The bat, which would have
flown around 52 millio