New research suggests the sucker-foot bat of Madagascar did not always live on their island home and made have originated elsewhere.
According to a press release, researchers at Duke University reported findings in the journal PLOS One that says the bats had two extinct ancestors in northern Egypt. The latest fossils were of jawbones and teeth and were dug up in the Sahara dessert.
The findings also make the sucker-foot bat family, named for their stick feet that allows them to roost on slippery surfaces, is actually about 36 million years older than previously estimated.
"We've assumed for a long time that they were an ancient lineage based on DNA sequence studies that have placed them close to very old groups in the bat family tree," study co-author Nancy Simmons, curator-in-charge of the American Museum of Natural History's Mammalogy Department, said in the release.
The bats are not currently known to live anywhere else except on the island of Madagascar and now have two different species. Unlike most bats, the sucker-foot roosts upright and not in caves, but rather on branches of a certain tropic tree.
The bats developed pads in the shape of cups on their wrists and ankles that act as an adhesive, as opposed to a suction mechanism, helping them stay put on slippery surfaces.
The two new fossil discoveries were found to be 30 million and 37 million years old. Simmons said northern Africa was tropical at that time, which would resemble modern Madagascar and not the modern-day Sahara.
"We think that the superfamily originated in Africa and moved eastward as Gondwana was coming apart," Gregg Gunnell, director of the Duke University Lemur Center's Division of Fossil Primates, said in the release. "These bats migrated to Australia, then actually went through Antarctica and up into South America using an ice-free corridor that connected the three continents until about 26 million years ago."
