text: With their fuzzy noses and rounded ears, bats are often called “rats with wings” or “flying rodents” by people who misunderstand them. But are they really related to the rodent family?
  Flatly, no. Bats are not even remotely related to mice or rats. Bats belong to the order Chiroptera, which is second only to order Rodentia (the rodent order) in number of species. If bats and rodents were classified together, they would make up about half of all mammal species! Chiroptera alone includes some 1,200 different types of bats. It is further divided into the suborders Megachiroptera (the large Old World fruit bats) and Microchiroptera (small bats found worldwide).
  If bats aren’t related to rodents, what are they related to? Bat classification is complicated because bats’ tiny delicate bones make for poor fossils. It used to be thought that bats were actually closely related to primates—including humans—but recent genome analysis has classified them in a superorder that includes animals such as pangolins and whales.