A bony connection signals laryngeal echolocation in bats

A bone of echolocationBats are highly specialized mammals — they can all fly, and many use echolocation to communicate and find prey. Work on a primitive fossil bat Onychonycteris finneyi suggested that although it could fly, it would not have been able to echolocate. Now a microcomputed tomography study of 26 bat species shows that in bats that use larynx-generated clicks to echolocate, the stylohyal bone in the throat is connected to the tympanic bone in the ear region of the skull. This condition is found in Onychonycteris, once again reopening basic questions about the timing and the origin of flight and echolocation in the early evolution of bats.