The question of where bats first appeared has resisted an answer for decades, in part because the fossil record for early bats is fragmentary and scattered across continents. A study published in Nature, drawing on the work of 137 researchers across 64 countries, has now produced the most comprehensive attempt yet to resolve it. By integrating genomic data from 103 bat species with evidence from 44 fossilised specimens, the analysis points to Europe as the probable birthplace of the order Chiroptera, sometime between 65 and 60 million years ago — a window that opens almost precisely at the end-Cretaceous extinction event.
That timing is not incidental. The disappearance of non-avian dinosaurs left an ecological landscape reorganised around new opportunities, and small, insectivorous mammals moved into niches that had been closed or contested. Whether European geography specifically favoured the emergence of powered flight in this lineage, rather than simply preserving the evidence for it, remains an open question the study does not fully settle.
What the analysis does claim, according to the source, is that both flight and echolocation developed very early in bat evolution — not as successive innovations but as features present near the beginning. The lineage then dispersed first into Africa and from there across the rest of the world. The direction of that dispersal matters for understanding how a single order came to occupy every continent except Antarctica, and how two such metabolically costly traits — sustained flight and active sonar — became fixed so early without leaving a clearer transitional record in the stone.
Marcus Azzopardi 
Harvey Jr.