What can mammal limb morphologies tell us about the evolution of bat flight?
Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight. How did they evolve that flight? While bats lack the fossil record to fully answer that question, some hypotheses think bats evolved from the gliding mammals (the "trees-down" theory), while others think bats evolved from small, running mammals that then began to flap and take off (the "ground-up" theory).
For this project, we used evolutionary modeling on linear measurements of forelimb and hind limb measurements of generalist, arboreal, gliding, and flying mammals. We ran these models on 29 limb traits to test whether bats could have evolved from an ancestor with limbs similar to modern day gliding mammals. |
Read the full article here:
Burtner AE, Grossnickle DM, Santana SE, & Law CJ. In review. Gliding towards an understanding of the origin of flight in bats. Submitted to Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.26.509622.
Burtner AE, Grossnickle DM, Santana SE, & Law CJ. In review. Gliding towards an understanding of the origin of flight in bats. Submitted to Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.26.509622.
Above, you can see me presenting my poster at the UW Undergraduate Symposium in May 2022 (left) and at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology's annual conference in January 2022 in Phoenix, AZ (right).