ArticleCommunications biology2024
Palaeoatmosphere facilitates a gliding transition to powered flight in the Eocene bat, Onychonycteris finneyi.
Article in Communications biology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- The squirrel barrier concept and its bearing on the evolution of aerial mammals.BMC ecology and evolution · 2026Review
- What Factors Shape the Flyability in Bats?-The Perspective from Bat's Wing Development.Biology · 2025Review
- From Development to Regeneration: Insights into Flight Muscle Adaptations from Bat Muscle Cell Lines.Cells · 2025Article
- The possible adaption of the human respiratory system to past atmospheres.Experimental physiology · 2024Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
The evolutionary transition to powered flight remains controversial in bats, the only flying mammals. We applied aerodynamic modeling to reconstruct flight in the oldest complete fossil bat, the archaic Onychonycteris finneyi from the early Eocene of North America. Results indicate that Onychonycteris was capable of both gliding and powered flight either in a standard normodense aerial medium or in the hyperdense atmosphere that we estimate for the Eocene from two independent palaeogeochemical proxies. Aerodynamic continuity across a morphological gradient is further demonstrated by modeled intermediate forms with increasing aspect ratio (AR) produced by digital elongation based on chiropteran developmental data. Here a gliding performance gradient emerged of decreasing sink rate with increasing AR that eventually allowed applying available muscle power to achieve level flight using flapping, which is greatly facilitated in hyperdense air. This gradient strongly supports a gliding (trees-down) transition to powered flight in bats.
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