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Flying with hands: The evolution of bat wings
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-flying-evolution-wings.html
The dream of flying has always fascinated humanity. In evolutionary history, the ability to fly has emerged independently only three times: in birds, pterosaurs, and, uniquely among mammals, in bats.
Bat wings are structurally similar to human hands, containing bones, blood vessels, nerves, and tendons. The key difference lies in a flexible skin membrane called the chiropatagium, which stretches between the elongated digits II to V. Additional membranes, the plagiopatagium and uropatagium, extend between the front and rear extremities, and between the legs, respectively.
Unlike bird or insect wings, the wings of bats can be moved like a hand during flight, making them particularly efficient and agile flying artists. In evolutionary terms, this adaptation has been a major success: with about 1,400 species, bats (order Chiroptera) are the second most diverse group of mammals after rodents. They are found all over the world, except in extreme deserts and polar regions.
How such remarkable capabilities like flight arise, along with the associated anatomical and functional changes, and how they are encoded in the genome has been a central question in biology since Darwin.
. . .
Bat wings are structurally similar to human hands, containing bones, blood vessels, nerves, and tendons. The key difference lies in a flexible skin membrane called the chiropatagium, which stretches between the elongated digits II to V. Additional membranes, the plagiopatagium and uropatagium, extend between the front and rear extremities, and between the legs, respectively.
Unlike bird or insect wings, the wings of bats can be moved like a hand during flight, making them particularly efficient and agile flying artists. In evolutionary terms, this adaptation has been a major success: with about 1,400 species, bats (order Chiroptera) are the second most diverse group of mammals after rodents. They are found all over the world, except in extreme deserts and polar regions.
How such remarkable capabilities like flight arise, along with the associated anatomical and functional changes, and how they are encoded in the genome has been a central question in biology since Darwin.
. . .