Although some have referred to bats as “flying rats”, most likely due to their furry rat like appearance, or perhaps because in many languages, the word for “bat” is actually cognate with the word for “mouse”, bats are not technically considered rodents. Scientifically speaking, bats are of the mammalian order Chiroptera, while rodents are of the mammalian order Rodentia. These winged creatures were formerly thought to be most closely related to flying lemurs, tree shrews, and primates, however recent research has now indicated that they actually belong to Laurasiatheria, a diverse group also containing Carnivora and Artiodactyla.
Very little fossil evidence is available to help map the evolution of bats. This is largely due to the fact that they do not fossilize well since they have such small, delicate skeletons. However, a Late Cretaceous tooth from South America resembles that of an early microchiropteran bat. Many of the oldest known, identified bat fossils were already very similar to modern microbats. These fossils are from the early Eocene period, 52.5 million years ago. While we may not know everything there is to know about bats or how they came to be, and while rats and bats may both have similar faces, each sporting a long snout and big pointy ears, at the end of the day one thing is for sure, they are not the same.
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