Abstract
AbstractAnderson and Ruxton (Mammal Review, 2020) reviewed the evolution of powered flight and laryngeal echolocation in bats. They hypothesised that powered flight and laryngeal echolocation evolved in separate lineages of handwing gliders. We note that fossil, character evolution, and developmental evidence contradicts their hypothesis, and we test their handwing gliding model, finding it aerodynamically implausible. We conclude that the traditional view of bat evolution (that flight and laryngeal echolocation evolved in the common ancestor of all bats, with the latter being lost in pteropodids) is more plausible than the proposed novel hypothesis.
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